OSCAR RENE CORNEJO
CAMINANTE : WAYFARER
March 13 - April 16, 2023
Caminante
Buon Fresco, coal, raw pigment on plaster on wooden tablet
6 x 7”
2022
Un dia a la vez
Buon Fresco, coal, raw pigment on plaster on wooden tablet
6 x 7”
2022
Ayer ya paso
Buon Fresco, coal, raw pigment on plaster on wooden tablet
6 1/2 x 7”
2022
Horizons
Buon fresco, raw pigment and coal on plaster, on clay tablet with cypress wood and ebony
dimensions variable
2023
Walls fade, Young banners rise
Naturally hand-dyed cotton
38 x 55”
2023
Francisco Goya
Madre Infeliz!
plate 50 from, Los desastres de la guerra
etching, burnished aquatint and drypoint
6 1/8 x 8 1/16” plate size
published posthumously, 1863
Thunder roared metal
Walls fade, young banners rise
Martyred rains bloom heat
Currently, I approach my works as fragmented moments and choreograph them to collectively resonate as a poem.
Cal graciously invited me to be in conversation with Francisco Goya's Madre Infeliz. The room is to be engaged with as a place of inquiry and active observation without the expectation of transaction. Sharing an affinity to Goya's Disasters of War series, I observe the history of my community's Civil War and wade through its fog to perceive how violence tears a community's social fabric and how it is felt in the present.
I ground my abstractions, compositions, icons, symbols, and signs by expanding visual metaphors to include an awareness of materials and techniques. In their deconstructions and observations, I advocate for an attention to how we perceive what's in front of us and fold that into our notions of violence and history. The process of fresco, mokuhanga, and carpentry are methodological metaphors for feeling our relationship to identity, history, and culture.
Through inquiry and reflection, without fear of judgment, I believe we can be aware of our relationship to violence. Perception can reconcile one's contact to trauma and begin to heal and embrace the resilience that is born out of conflict rather than a denial and suppression of the pain that comes from it which perpetuates cycles of violence.
As a second-generation Salvadoran American, it was a profound experience to shift from being victims of a conflict outside our control to a position of empowerment through comprehending the resilient nature of my parent's journey fleeing war and building a new home and family in unknown lands. I continue their legacy of overcoming uprootedness by creating new spaces for inquiry and self-realization through awareness.
-Oscar Rene Cornejo