Absence Makes His Heart Grow Fonder

People disappear in any number of ways--by physically departing, migrating or dying; by drifting away emotionally; by being forcibly purged from memory and the public record. Havana-based artist Raul Cordero evokes all of these processes of removal and nuances of loss in his recent paintings, which are now on view at the Iturralde Gallery in the artist’s first U.S. show.

Cordero paints scenes based on old family pictures, found photographs of strangers and images--advertisements, film stills--from American popular culture. Throughout, he excises figures, leaving ghostly voids marked by dashed outlines. In the diptych “395/359, Contigo o sin ti” (With or without you), he alters an image lifted from an American Express ad of Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn standing together on a seashore in the warm glow of a sunset. In one panel, Cronyn stands alone, accompanied only by Tandy’s outline. In the other, Tandy is there and he is only hinted at.

“It’s a love painting,” Cordero explained, while putting the final touches on the installation recently. “It’s about the history of the couple. Who are you when I’m not with you? Who am I when you’re not with me? That’s the meaning of the numbers--359 and 395. They’re the same, but different.”

Tall and slim, his slightly sultry good looks accentuated by black clothing from head to toe, Cordero is gracious with his time, even having just arrived on his first visit to the country the night before, with his show opening the next day. He’s savvy but earnest, a worldly 26, having studied for a year in the Hague, participated in the last two Havana Biennials and had shows in Canada, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Switzerland and Belgium.

Young Cuban artists living on the island and in exile in the U.S. have established a dynamic presence in the art scene in recent years. Despite their range of styles and subjects, the tendency from here is to view their work through the lens of politics, and indeed, in Cordero’s case, there are ample connections to be made between his erased figures and the pictorial assassinations carried out by Castro, and Stalin before him, to eradicate former comrades and estranged family members from the photographic record. Such manipulation and myth-making have been commonplace in regimes imposing controls on speech, activity and movement.

Cordero doesn’t refute such connections, but he draws attention to the more personal aspects of his work, its intimate evocations of time and memory. In conversation, he tends to unload the images, rather than add more layers of meaning. He dismisses the associations they carry from their original functions to focus on what he regards as the core issue--the sensual aspects of presence and absence.

“I don’t like the kind of meanings related to wider society. I’m more interested in personal experience, love, person-to-person. You’re here,” he says, extending his hand. “When you leave, I respect your empty space.”

The emotional weight of absence is palpable in his paintings. They are permeated by loss and often tinged with tenderness and nostalgia.

“The most present persons in the paintings are the ones in the outlines,” he says.

In “You Must Remember This,” Cordero repeats an image of a group of young men and women above and below the phrase “As time goes by. . . .” One figure in the top group is already a phantom of gold dashes. Two more have vanished in the group below, rendering the memory of shared intimacy skeletal, diffused, incomplete.

As in all of the current paintings, Cordero defines the figures in “You Must Remember This” in warm tones reminiscent of old, monochromatic photographs. The contours blur in even streaks, creating a rich, fluid echo of time’s continual passage. Nothing is fixed or still, and no moment stands isolated from those before and after it. Cordero’s fascination with the passage of time and his use of images in sequence link his work to film, which he draws upon heavily for source material.

In movies, as in his paintings, “things disappear quickly. The scene after this will be different,” he says.

Cordero has also worked in photography, video and installation, and he’s eager to make movies of his own one day. To get the stills he uses in his paintings, he takes his camera and tripod to theaters in Havana--which, he notes, are completely dominated by American films--and shoots directly from the screen. Several paintings in the current show are based on stills he made from “Pulp Fiction,” “White Man’s Burden” and “From Dusk Till Dawn.” They are scenes of desperation and tension, where characters hold guns to each other’s heads or to their own, or engage in heated dialogue. Cordero takes these raw, charged images and teams them, uneasily, with others, more banal, or subtitles of his own devising--in English, ironically, and mismatched, absurd. Below a cab scene in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” for instance, Cordero has one character asking another, “Do you like Madonna, sir?”

Occasionally, Cordero adheres reproductions of works by other artists to the surface of his paintings. Well versed in art history through the exhibitions he’s seen on his travels and the materials he uses in his teaching at the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Habana, he counts Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Lucien Freud, Eric Fischl and Bruce Nauman as favorites and influences. In one painting at Iturralde, a John Travolta character threatens another with a gun. The caption, “You’ve got 3 seconds. How many lips, cows, Jackies, boxes and Andys have we got up there?” refers to five Warhol images along the top of the canvas, all paintings of a single image (self-portrait, Jackie O., Marilyn Monroe’s lips) repeated numerous times.

It’s the viewer’s job to put the pieces of these so-called “Quiz Paintings” together, to take the challenge, to play the game, Cordero says. In a new work that’s not in the current show, Cordero has painted a portrait of himself “as a murderer,” commanding the viewer to find which two of nine given images match, “or I’ll kill you.”

These “thriller paintings” are at once aggressive and trite, their violence all out of proportion to the situation at hand. They are disjunctive, unsettling and as always, lushly painted. Though the references are usually traceable, the connotations are open-ended. The quiz, then, becomes a dark spoof of the presumption that art can be decoded, its meaning solved like a puzzle, through joining the given pieces.

“In art, you always try to find an answer,” Cordero says, “but you never find it. The answer doesn’t exist, never.”

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“RAUL CORDERO: QUIZ PAINTINGS,” Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave. Dates: Tuesdays to Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Closed next Sunday through Jan. 5.) Ends Jan. 17. Phone: (213) 937-4267.