Cordero is a graduate of the University of the Philippines and is a Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awardee. His ‘street’ credibility draws from his continuing engagement in a distinctly in- your-face yet seemingly ambivalent relationship with what constitutes the contours of folk/Pinoy rock, underground and hipster sub-culture, dually persistent in a strain of art from the American West Coast.
His Nardong Tae comic series, and more recent three-dimensional incursions mining kitschy icons of B-movie/pulp fiction, materialize in this biennale via his work, Smash the Cool. This graphic pairing of painting and sculpture plays into the dark underside of the Maximum City theme in the way individuals turn up as casualties in an unceasing pursuit of the fraught project of belonging, this even as Cordero himself refuses any facile attempts at construing subjectivities.
© JAKARTA BIENNALE 2011
