Current Exhibition
OSCAR RENE CORNJEO
APOSEMATIC
bridgegallery
98 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
Subway F, J, M, Z Delancey/Essex
bridgegalleryny@gmail.com
212-674-6320
Gallery Hours:
Sunday-Friday 11-5pm
Saturday 12-6pm
A first generation Salvadoran-American, Cornejo’s work is concerned with the representation of traumatic events and its effects on collective historical memory as a way to reconcile historical conflict, with a particular emphasis on the civil war in El Salvador between 1980 to 1992.
Cornejo received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2005. In 2004, he Co-Founded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad) which he continues to direct to this day. He is currently a member of AGWF, a curatorial team. He was awarded a Fulbright in 2007. Most recently, he received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2011. Cornejo lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

The latin word propages, “a slip, a cutting of a vine,” refers to the gardener’s practice of spreading shoots. He slips the vine of the original plant, and ripping into the earth, sows seeds for future growth and generations. The verb, propagate, steals from this ancient reference, as does the noun Propaganda.
In these rootwords, wound in their own meaning, lie the entanglements of Oscar Rene Cornejo’s imperative to disseminate. Like propaganda, the content is as urgent as the form, and the through-line remains clear – a message must be read. His works are driven by a call for action, a relentless impulse to tell a story, at once personal and political, which ‘speaks truth to power’ (if we must conjure that utopic cliché). Nietzsche called this sensibility a will to power: “not a being, not a becoming, it is [first] a pathos.” Indeed, from this suffering the tragic hero purifies that which is polluted and filthy.
For Cornejo, history is the tainted object that must be distilled and diffused; filtered through a pathos akin to the suffering long buried in the recesses of repressed collective memory. Earlier prints capture abject glances amidst everyday violence and war, archives that make visible a mass of silenced testimonies, carved onto woodblocks and into timelessness, and made permanent and accessible through printing technologies. Quotidian snapshots and auto-ethnographic images are ‘collected and ordered’ into portable propaganda. Guerilla-style travelogues scratch the surface of an itching past, unearthing Cornejo’s drive to propagate as he excavates.
From this organic compulsion emerges a visual lexicon that repeats as it declares, his paintings indexing a grammar of stencil and silk-screen, woodcut and lithograph. Cornejo’s practical and intellectual process is as conscious as his choice in mediums. A restricted palette wrestles modest material choices. Geometric constellations, expressed in bold yellows, blues and reds, confront iconic tropes of conflict – the state often pitting the multitude. The familiar red squares recall the heroes of Constructivist ideals, harkening a deliberate ethos to his abstractions. It might be consciously art beyond its own sake, but these superimpositions also push the ideological limits of a pictorial and abstracted matrix. Cornejo’s reappropriations – whether deliberate or not – dig into collective archives of older signs, recharging nuanced meaning unto already mined images.
A bricolage of painter’s cloth, roof shingles and cutout felt, are framed by boldly carved impressions and built-up by spackled cement and long luminous brushstrokes. The enamel sheen casts a glow onto ancient Spartan forms, creating a palimpthestic collage complicated by the use of signified materials and hieroglyphic-like texts. The temporality of printmaking is tested by the pace of the brush, playing with notions of time and transparency. The weathered markings of moments past underwrite the direct call for future action.
Text and logos are central to Cornejo’s ouvre, but the sedimentation of signs onto images flirt beyond the immediacy of orthodox propaganda. The urgency of Cornejo’s text alongside the ruptures in figuration betray the classic decoupage. The writing on the wall enters the frame, and a stenciled chant belts out: Insurgent. Sympathizing Peasant. We won. I used to believe in Forever but Forever was too good to be true. Another work entitled Cristovive, strings together a humorous reversal of advertising’s ability to spin truth and center the masses. A large red fog hovers over corporate signage with floating Winnie- the-poos and Jesus colliding into a Nike swoosh. These are just some examples of Cornejo’s semiotic renderings that spin new meaning out of commodity forms.
Cornejo’s aesthetic practice, a delicate and visceral balance of excavation, germination and propagation lies at the very root of human impulse, too. The great American revolutionary, Jose Marti, once expressed: “To be a radical is no more than that: to go to the roots. He who does not see things in their depth should not call himself a radical.” These visual speech acts carry an emancipatory potential and, like Cornejo’s grassroots approach, activate in others a deep and authentic human connection.
-Lucia Cantero
OSCAR RENE CORNJEO
APOSEMATIC
bridgegallery
98 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
Subway F, J, M, Z Delancey/Essex
bridgegalleryny@gmail.com
212-674-6320
Gallery Hours:
Sunday-Friday 11-5pm
Saturday 12-6pm
A first generation Salvadoran-American, Cornejo’s work is concerned with the representation of traumatic events and its effects on collective historical memory as a way to reconcile historical conflict, with a particular emphasis on the civil war in El Salvador between 1980 to 1992.
Cornejo received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2005. In 2004, he Co-Founded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad) which he continues to direct to this day. He is currently a member of AGWF, a curatorial team. He was awarded a Fulbright in 2007. Most recently, he received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2011. Cornejo lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

The latin word propages, “a slip, a cutting of a vine,” refers to the gardener’s practice of spreading shoots. He slips the vine of the original plant, and ripping into the earth, sows seeds for future growth and generations. The verb, propagate, steals from this ancient reference, as does the noun Propaganda.
In these rootwords, wound in their own meaning, lie the entanglements of Oscar Rene Cornejo’s imperative to disseminate. Like propaganda, the content is as urgent as the form, and the through-line remains clear – a message must be read. His works are driven by a call for action, a relentless impulse to tell a story, at once personal and political, which ‘speaks truth to power’ (if we must conjure that utopic cliché). Nietzsche called this sensibility a will to power: “not a being, not a becoming, it is [first] a pathos.” Indeed, from this suffering the tragic hero purifies that which is polluted and filthy.
For Cornejo, history is the tainted object that must be distilled and diffused; filtered through a pathos akin to the suffering long buried in the recesses of repressed collective memory. Earlier prints capture abject glances amidst everyday violence and war, archives that make visible a mass of silenced testimonies, carved onto woodblocks and into timelessness, and made permanent and accessible through printing technologies. Quotidian snapshots and auto-ethnographic images are ‘collected and ordered’ into portable propaganda. Guerilla-style travelogues scratch the surface of an itching past, unearthing Cornejo’s drive to propagate as he excavates.
From this organic compulsion emerges a visual lexicon that repeats as it declares, his paintings indexing a grammar of stencil and silk-screen, woodcut and lithograph. Cornejo’s practical and intellectual process is as conscious as his choice in mediums. A restricted palette wrestles modest material choices. Geometric constellations, expressed in bold yellows, blues and reds, confront iconic tropes of conflict – the state often pitting the multitude. The familiar red squares recall the heroes of Constructivist ideals, harkening a deliberate ethos to his abstractions. It might be consciously art beyond its own sake, but these superimpositions also push the ideological limits of a pictorial and abstracted matrix. Cornejo’s reappropriations – whether deliberate or not – dig into collective archives of older signs, recharging nuanced meaning unto already mined images.
A bricolage of painter’s cloth, roof shingles and cutout felt, are framed by boldly carved impressions and built-up by spackled cement and long luminous brushstrokes. The enamel sheen casts a glow onto ancient Spartan forms, creating a palimpthestic collage complicated by the use of signified materials and hieroglyphic-like texts. The temporality of printmaking is tested by the pace of the brush, playing with notions of time and transparency. The weathered markings of moments past underwrite the direct call for future action.
Text and logos are central to Cornejo’s ouvre, but the sedimentation of signs onto images flirt beyond the immediacy of orthodox propaganda. The urgency of Cornejo’s text alongside the ruptures in figuration betray the classic decoupage. The writing on the wall enters the frame, and a stenciled chant belts out: Insurgent. Sympathizing Peasant. We won. I used to believe in Forever but Forever was too good to be true. Another work entitled Cristovive, strings together a humorous reversal of advertising’s ability to spin truth and center the masses. A large red fog hovers over corporate signage with floating Winnie- the-poos and Jesus colliding into a Nike swoosh. These are just some examples of Cornejo’s semiotic renderings that spin new meaning out of commodity forms.
Cornejo’s aesthetic practice, a delicate and visceral balance of excavation, germination and propagation lies at the very root of human impulse, too. The great American revolutionary, Jose Marti, once expressed: “To be a radical is no more than that: to go to the roots. He who does not see things in their depth should not call himself a radical.” These visual speech acts carry an emancipatory potential and, like Cornejo’s grassroots approach, activate in others a deep and authentic human connection.
-Lucia Cantero
