García

García Cordero Exhibits His Work in Miami

Dominican Artist José García Cordero, born in Santiago de los Caballeros in 1951 and a resident of Paris since 1977, is presenting his work in a one-man show in at the Gallery Walk in Miami’s Wynwood Art District until January 30. The name of his show is “Full Optimist.”  The exhibition is being celebrated in parallel with the International Contemporary Art Fair, “Art Basel Miami Beach 2007”.

“Full Optimist” is a collection of unedited paintings, curated by “Lorproject” which forms part of one of the artist’s recent and most insightful periods. The viewer confronts, once again, the artist’s fascinating world of painting with his characteristic, ironic language. The work is full of black humor as seen from a sinister threshold with shades of optimistic views of existence, according to a press communiqué.

Some of the pieces in the show are included in the artist’s new book “The Divine Me” which contains more than 90 photos from the past 25 years of his uninterrupted work. According to art critic Laura Gil, “García Cordero has had stroke of genius in the way he’s done his self-portrait not only as an exercise but a portrait that is overwhelmingly lucid and introspective. He’s done a portrait of his times by exposing the generational roots and motives of validation that verge on the universal. In doing so, he has absorbed modern cultural traditions such as Sartre’s existentialism and other Europeans like Nietzsche. In addition, he expresses, with brilliance and energy, the anomaly of hybrid and post-colonial cultures found in the post-modern world but yet he himself does not give in totally to modernism.

“But his greatest genius has been to recognize and express the fragile essence of that which is wild and fierce. There is no worse violence that of an injured or persecuted animal,” continued Gil. “The violence all around us that threatens us, inside and outside our own soul, is the violence of fear.”

Galería Lyle O Reitzel Gallery

Wynwood Art District

2441NW 2nd Ave. Miami, Flirida 33127

lylegallerymiami@bellsouth.net

www.artnet.com/reitzel.html