Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine. February 2009. Issue #97
Expect mutilation. Expect dismemberment. Expect human beings made out of feces. Louie Cordero’s imagery slaps you in the face, in the sense that you know it’s entrancing, but you can’t even begin to comprehend it. Navigating the twisted landscape of Louie’s visceral scenes one might be able to enter, if only for a moment, the Filipino identity. Informed by a history of colonization, Catholic domination, and trickles from Western culture that seem to have gone through a game of telephone, Louie painstakingly renders each and every intestine, membrane, and capillary. His palette reflects a visual culture where advertisements, fashion, and even architecture are a patchwork of international footprints.
Louie does not stop with brilliantly detailed bright neon environments; the characters are intricate and often critically wounded. These are peepholes into the infrastructure of human beings; the history that defines them, what is always there but never investigated. And for one’s insides to be exposed usually means death or serious physical trauma. Yet Louie addresses alarming violence with analytic precision; death is not inherent in the autopsies of these bodies. The characters are jovial and seemingly calm, unaware of their exposed innards. The viewer may be left in shock, unable to find a starting point to interpret twin fiberglass Catholic schoolboys with half their faces skinned. But the ornate savagery is nothing more than an expression of contradiction, which seems to describe Pinoy culture. Coming from a surface that reflects international culture out of context, misunderstood with invented meaning, Louie dissects to expose the systems behind it all.
Louie was born and raised in the town of Malabon just outside the Philippine capital, Manila. His Roman Catholic education provided the backdrop for his personal vice: “When I was young I read a lot of MAD Magazine and Fangoria, and old Filipino comics and some American: Hal Santiago, Vincent Kua, Alfredo Alcala, Nonoy Marcelo, Jack Kirby, Basil Wolverton’s, Crumb, and Zap comix.” The gory, fantastical universe of his comics isn’t actually that oppositional to the religious dogma beaten into him; stories of the beast marked 666, holy spirits, and the crucifixion were meant to instill fear in young pupils. Louie soaked up the violent stories as bona fide realities, unfiltered in his impressionable youth. When he first doodled guts ‘n’ blood as a boy, his parents blamed it on “too much horror films on betamax.” But it wasn’t just the gore that impacted this youngster. Louie was immersed in the eclectic, colorful Filipino landscape; remnants of 500 years of Spanish and American colonization welded with age-old Filipino tradition. He especially admired the iconic jeepneys: American military jeeps left over from World War II, which have been modified for public transportation in the Philippines. Louie now reflects, “it’s where I get my inspiration: kitsch objects on wheels. There are different and very complex artisan decorations on each jeepney. I’m really fascinated with the juxtaposition of religious images and heavy metal imagery and fonts done by the local artisans- mostly done in airbrush, stencils, and hand paint.”
When Louie moved to Manila, he was enlightened with liberalism: “When I got to the University of the Philippines, famous for being a state university where all the radicals and intellectuals studied, who protested and organized anti-martial law in the 70’s during the Marcos era, it changed and opened my mind.quot;mso-spacerun: yes;"> I was so mixed up,” he recalls. While studying painting in the second most populous Phili ppine city, Louie began to digest the ideology of his small-town youth. Redefining traumatic imagery of corporal annihilation that was part of his childhood memory, the artist emerged. His is a fascination wrought by fear: anxiety over zombies, monsters, and retribution. Yet he has come to terms with religion, and learned how to use it to his advantage: “I don’t go to church anymore- sometimes just to see some weird stuff. Most Christian iconography is horrific, lots of blood and gore.”
After graduating, Louie came to the States for the first time as an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center in 2004. And the biggest culture shock of that summer? “Hippies, cows, grass. gt; And being a young Asian in a very white neighborhood. I thought US was all tall buildings, very busy (too many Hollywood films).yes;"> But when I got there it was really quiet. I learned so much when I went there, being just alone and not in my comfort zone.” It was the same year that Louie first showed in the States, adding to a long list of international venues on his CV. However the majority of his influence is still local: “Filipino artists, especially right now, are doing more complex and very intriguing works. We have a lot to offer here: not just boxers, maltreated overseas workers, call center agents, prostitutes, maids, and care givers. The problem here is that we don’t have enough support from the institutions, governments, and galleries. We tend to do it DIY, to improvise and dive into the unknown, not knowing where to land. The important thing is the journey, right?”
This DIY ethic has given Louie plenty of landings. Easily bored, he always has several projects developing simultaneously. The most notable is his ongoing comic series Nardong Tae, described as such: “It’s just a sci-fi melodrama about a kid who turns into a shit, then becomes a man, and wants to pursue a normal life even though he still remains a shit.” Louie wrote the comic in Tagalog, illustrated it by hand, and distributed Xerox copies to strategic locations in Manila. When asked why he didn’t sign the comics, Louie divulges, “I want those comics to be anonymous, I want the character to stand on its own without any author or illustrator, and I want it to be really secretive. I want to release it in just a certain area, it’s more like a viral disease, nobody knows where it came from, but its everywhere.” Once the comics gathered a cult following, Louie’s authorship was leaked and “it became boring.” However, Nardong Tae has gained notoriety from international comic fans and now has an official publisher. Nardong Tae is up to volume 4 out of 12, and the story has much development ahead: “The story ends in Siberia. There will be more complicated things that happen. I plan to finish it when I have time next year, I always say that, but it never happens.”
Maybe that’s because he has recently devoted himself full-time to painting: comics and other endeavors aside. One of those endeavors had been a dabble in animation when he created the music video “Positive for Negative” for local underground band The Sleepyheads. Sketchy lines portray a boy (whose head is bigger than his body) eating a cookie, which somehow lands the band members in his brain matter. They play music until the boy pukes them up, and all happily walk into the distance holding hands. Louie describes this narrative as “nonsense” and comments that he has set aside animation for the moment because “it’s grueling, it’s difficult, expensive, time consuming, and my hands ache a lot.” However, the final product is so rewarding that he plans to revisit animation with a full-length film in the future.
But still, the mystery goes unanswered. From where do the details of each gruesome character arise, from what reference does Louie draw his complex nightmares? Louie explains that while “doodling, in the bus while being bored, talking on the phone, just staring at a white wall, or after I wake up in a dream my idea usually haunts me. It will stick to my mind, endlessly, until I need to draw it on paper as a concrete idea.”
When it comes to organizing sinuous compositions he notes, “I enjoy drawing a lot, I do it everyday as an exercise. For me it’s kind of natural now, its more fun the more complex it is, like problem solving.” As the subject matter comes to Louie so readily, the only effort is to transcribe what he sees in his head onto paper.
Living in the Philippines seems to be a sensory overload, one that transfers to Louie’s work. He describes, “it’s chaos over here. Billboards everywhere, ultra-pink highways, weird signboards, government funded color scheme graffiti, hell-on-earth car and pedestrian traffic, shit and dead animals floating on the streets when it’s flooded, zombie-like brain-drained overnight shift workers. An ideal picturesque view of a country that is underdeveloped.” In a space where all is copied from the west, hints of Filipino tradition still seep through. The textiles are made of pineapple woven cloth, and Louie describes decorating as being “kitsch, with horror vacui aesthetics,” meaning there is no empty space. Louie goes on to describe the visual landscape of his country: “I think the visual culture here is interesting. It’s a weird mix up of things; from the people alone you can see that. A kid wearing a Jesus-cross necklace and a swastika bag going to school; people wearing loincloths from the mountain province who are really hooked on American country music and still believe that Jean Claude van Damme and Steven Segal are cool; people being killed by singing ‘My Way’ in videoke. It’s the lure of the image itself without any context at all. It’s all about how people were assimilated, without any understanding, because we sometimes can’t perceive foreign concepts since we don’t have that kinda stuff. So we tend to imagine and try to improvise. It’s like during the old times, American ‘thomasites’ teaching a native the concept of ‘snow.’ How can he understand, he is living in the tropics, there is no snow here in Manila.”
Just as his animated boy throws up the band, so his artwork regurgitates undigested chunks of consumed Filipino mass culture. The result is grotesque but refreshing. His work is a reaction to a cycle of destruction, rebuilding, and mutating central to the Philippines. In a sense his imagery cuts and pastes from the varied Filipino climate, saturated with tribulation and karaoke. As Manila was the second most destroyed city after WWII, it is still in recovery. The war devastated but also left behind an array of new foreign influences. According to Louie: “It’s still the same, we never progress. We are all still deteriorating, still rotting towards the never-ending pit. Someone said that Manila is like LA in the year 3000, more like Bladerunner. People here have to deal with what’s left. No advancement, it’s all appropriations and adjustments and improvisations. That’s why I think the jeepneys were made. Imagine everything here is like that: our culture just salvaged and refurbished and adjusted to make sense in the tropics.”
It is from this perspective that one can fully relate to a trim schoolboy puking up cardiac organs, or a nonchalant pedestrian with half his cranium sawed off exposing a vibrant pink brain. In truth, such Kafkaesque scenes reflect the bizarre reality that we live in. The paranormal is presented as commonplace in Louie’s work, forcing one to acknowledge the absurdity of what we are so used to: the histories of poverty, war, and domination that have molded contemporary times. However, Louie addresses the absurd with a tinge of playfulness and indifference. It’s as if to resign oneself to “se la vie” and poke fun at that which is beyond understanding. And that seems to be the Filipino survival kit. The past is the past, and the future looks bright for the vivacious people of these paradisiacal islands.
Besides, with inspiration looming in every decoration, poster, or passing jeepney, how could a painter ever leave? And Louie doesn’t plan to. He elaborates, “I think I will not ever leave the Philippines. This is where I grew up, where I get my inspiration... especially in Manila. I have been to so many cities in my life, but I will always go back home, this is my home. The energy here is very powerful; people here know how to survive even though they have less. Life is simple here, but also chaotic, all mixed-up. That’s why it interests me. Everybody smiles here, even though we have problems, humor is the greatest medicine that Filipinos have for depression and hunger.”
Copyright © 2011 Kirsten Incorvaia. All Rights Reserved.