Between the painter and the owner: James Cordas

24 hours and three weeks before I saw an exhibition organized by James Cordas and a group of musicians, artists and hangers-on like me, I met James at a house party in a worn-out converted San Francisco high rise hotel. After the party we stumbled to his apartment above Ellis Street in the Tenderloin and he showed me Bread, hanging in his wall.

Three days later James asked if I could help him carry some records to a bar where he was dj-ing. The place was owned by a woman named Ling who liked the art student money so much she let anyone with tight jeans and manicured hair play whatever they wanted until people stop showing up. She expected James and his partner to play top forty hip hop tracks, she got the Animals and Wu Tang Clan instead.

Owners of Tenderloin dive bars have other things to worry about. Two drunken tourist walked in with cuts weeping on their hands. I was chatting with about his peculiar affliction synaesthesia, sound as color when I saw them. The owner scared them off without much effort, her thin little strips of vascular muscle projected high pitched threats of castration over the music and a pool cue waved in the air. James looked up but just for a second and bought me a beer and tried to cram the concept of melodic yellow in beer bleached grey matter.

That is how James's paintings and installations function aesthetically the senses blend like the limited concepts of genre; pop-art fused with an abstract expressionist angst; stark and once playful; like the word Bread deconstruction semiotically and dangled like a banner of meaninglessness at the head of the canvas reassembled into new constructs.

On another canvas covered in clippings from vintage porn magizines; moments of grimy coitus, over miniaturized musical notes in this piece called a five year old and a negro spiritual. Layering colors and mindscapes like, creating with from found detritus, a new thing and thought in a style somewhere in the vein of Billy Apple, Sir Peter Blake and Derek Boshier.

For him the sensory identifiers become a language, fold into one another so the world is a collection of dynamic sensation. It is these sensations that James relays to the viewer through the canvas. Its not the ham-handled expressionism American art schools churn out along with $100,000 diplomas. There is a spirit of active adventure and wonder that keeps the work honest. The kind of honest that can only to late binge paint and bitter beer drinking and bloody hand prints on the door of a bathroom stall.