Rittenhouse cafe is hosting an Ecuadorian artist throughout this month: Oliverio Corrales. The opening reception for the show is tonight at 7:30-9:30pm. Check out more of his work on his website.
About the Artist:
“The central theme of my painting is the human being, in particular, the Andean subject, a personage I always seek to reflect in a positive way. Being this my point at issue, I have placed special care on showing what for me is the essence of the Ecuadorian Indigenous self: its millenary culture, its inherited roots passed on from generation to generation, its wisdom, its sublime respect for the mother land ( Pacha Mama) and its spiritual richness and nobility. These cultural and individual attributes have inspired me to present the Andean men and women with the dignity which characterizes their personae. In this matter, my pursue is to re-cognize the Andean individual devoid of pure exotic perceptions which distance him from the rest of the world. On the contrary, I seek to rescue and capture his personhood which has been buried beneath widespread characterization of the extrinsic, foreign and many times arrogant mystification of the indigenous peoples. This time, the Ecuadorian, indigenous self can be read by a wider audience more an more aware of the aspects that link all cultures and creeds under the same rubric, human-hood and the challenges, desires and experiences of everyday existence.
To achieve this objective, I started from the real world and transferred the subject matter to a Surreal aesthetic. I have done this in part because surrealism is a universal language in the arts and psychoanalysis, which invites the audience to read the Andean subject without required formal knowledge of their cultural patterns or particularities. It also allows spectators to free associate the indigenous with any individual in the world who expresses not only a cultural tradition but a human pursuit. The other reason is that surrealism expresses in macro-dimensions what in Latin America has been termed Magical Realism which is a more localized characterization of the magical, mythical and quotidian embedded in Latin American cultures, tendencies with which my work has been identified.
In essence, these tendencies give free rain to my imagination, without distortion of the true essence of the human being, while offering an aesthetic alternative which is different and original in its projection.”
