Pepe Coronado’s Obstrucciones
 
Each one of Pepe Coronado’s images is the result of the simple manipulation of form: Strips of cut or torn paper are folded or bent and placed in a setting of temporary paper walls and a base, and then photographed in strong, direct light.  Occasionally, this light source projects an image – a transparency of a previous paper construction – which washes over the structure like a kind of visual memory.  When these images are strung together into a series, the logic of how each image is made is displaced by a singular compulsion to travel by sight, and by sight alone, through the warrens of this Kasbah of form and shadow.
 
The impulse is not to describe them, but to parallel its flow and hurdles with a corollary visual experience.  In Jean-Luc Godard’s film Alphaville the viewer traverses through a futuristic Paris.  Obstructions and detours are the movie’s life force – and through the visual turnstiles of these barriers and divergences the bewildered viewer hurdles from one aspect of the story to another.
 
The intention of Obstrucciones is to “obstruct,” not “obscure” – the artist is very specific about this.  So what is being obstructed?  An unimpeded view of just where we are.  Any inkling of what the eventual destination or outcome of our adventure might be.  Or even a firm visual grasp of the terrain we have just passed through.
 
The poet Dante Alighieri begins The Inferno by saying that in the middle of his life he became lost in a dark wood.  It is an old theme, based on an ancient sensation of unease.
 
What is the sensation of being lost in the woods?  The traveler, or the traveler’s eye, feels uneasy, loses confidence in how the path is unfolding, and looks behind for reassurance – and suddenly sees that nothing is as the eye recalls.  And when the eye casts frantically ahead, the path is now no longer familiar.  Everything has shifted in what was, just moments ago, the realm of the known.
 
It is at this point that Pepe Coronado’s essential intention is achieved – the traveler has become a wanderer, and the familiar an obstruction.
 
Don Cook, Artist

 

 

 

Directions: DC Contemporary Latino Art (2007)

Directions in post-latino art

 

The photographs of Pepe Coronado provide postmodern commentary on earlier art movements. Coronado’s Construcciones (Contructions) are variations on the interplay of light, shadow, line and form with a soft focus that recalls experimental photography of the 1920s and 1930s such as the Rayographs of Man Ray (1890-1976) or the radical Constructivist photographs composed by Alexandr Rodchenko (1891-1956). Coronado emphasizes formal concerns and new techniques in digital printing rather than ethnic identity or political subtext.

 

Laura Roulet, Independent Curator

 

 

 

Pepe Coronado presents photographically what is no longer there physically. Printed on Somerset paper to produce the luxurious surface of a charcoal drawing or a softly focused monochrome by Gerhard Richter, these digital photographs bring together planes, lines, shadow and reection in compositions that suggest the elegance and permanence of ambitious architecture. In actuality, these pristine images capture portable elements temporarily arranged diorama–like in the artist's studio, existing there only to be photographed and then disassembled and dispersed into new congurations. For Coronado, this circular, ambiguous process of construction, documentation, dispersal and re-construction acts as a metaphor for the broader concept of migration.

 

Kristen Hileman, Assistant Curator, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC. (2005)

 

 

 

Art With Accent Latin Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Sates (2004)

 

His new series, Construcciones, reects the rootless, disoriented state of the migrant. Coronado sets up ephemeral installations (glass, wire, metal, light and shadow), metaphors for the self in transition. In his words“ they are dened by their ability to hang together, to reform to meet changing conditions. They quietly function in an ambiguous reality, but they are not passive reactors, they are creators of new spaces through the integration and interaction of the elements at hand.” At the artist’s will, the elements constantly change form and exist, precarious as a house of cards, long enough to be photographed, dismantled and rebuilt anew. He comments. ”They are created only to provide the event for the photo session.”

 

Susana Torruella Leval, Director Emerita, El Museo del Barrio, New York

 

 

 

 

“Continuum” Innovative Prints from 1992 to 2007

 

from the collection of Pyramid Atlantic Print Center.

His austerely elegant digital photographs, two from his construcción serie and this year’s Border, combine elements of his photography, printmaking, drawing, and installation work.

 

Katherine L. Blood, Curator

 

 

 

Pepe Coronado’s renement and dedicated vision to architectural forms, currently created in gray scale, and tonal investigation is breathtaking and unique.

 

Helen Frederick, Director of Pyramid Atlantic Print Center.

 

 

 

Constant Changing

 

Pepe's work comes in series: influencias, contrucciones, obstrucciones. This show combines these; all of them grouped as families of images that derived from the same circumstance and happening, sharing as brothers and sisters a material, a shape, a light, a stage and a commanding eye. There is a whole process before the final image which, as sleek and minimalist it appears, can project the complexity in the thinking and the respect to the quality of the material. Pepe's work seems to engage/mesmerize with endless possibilities for our visual memory and the tangrams/compositions that spring from his very light but specific handmade structures.

 

Once we get to enjoy one, there is the tendency of game-guessing the next light, next wall and next possible continuous shape, just that we may not be very successful as Pepe thrives in surprising us with his compositions and the use of the more basic of elements: light, shape, place. The images are so sleek and clean yet full of shadows and mystery.

 

Structures get erected to become something else and end up like an else of sorts. Each one of them is handmade, placed, moved, shot, replaced, picked, printed and shown. And the process starts all over again…only what was is not anymore; and what we got will probably never happen again as the light changed, his hands moved, his eyes shifted, the sun set, the paper curled and the camera blinked.

 

But we stand still for merely a second to witness what was going on; and that's all we need to remember: the ray of light, the black, the white, the wind; and the final image that Pepe picked to make us part of his world.

 

he/she saw, I saw, we saw, they saw...we keep imagining....

 

iliana emilia garcia