James / Cordas/ Long / Over/ Due: Do Over

James likes to reinvent his previous work. There were experiments in medium, and content. Alterations on older pieces on exhibition that night. Clipping, snipping, and painting over them so nothing is wasted but everything is in a constant state of self-perpetuating innovation of his work. 

Tits performed a rushed set like grenade going off in a cathedral. Maj, James, and Nick's atmospheric cacophonies and flitting vocals emanated from behind glass masks. Sounds circling a crowd of people thirty deep while James murdered his drums as Marguerite soldered her voice to Nick's keyboard melodies.
After knowing James Cordas for two years; waking up on his floor after nights of composition and decomposition, chatting back and forth about modernist reality, beer, and seeing sound, and experimental drummers, I've learned that he's worth following around.

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.

View form above: James Cordas

I’ve only seen these paintings through the digital blockade; email, info dumps, rich text renders, and the like. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Between the syringes and through the digital eye I was able to make connection I might have glanced over; but as in everything the little goblins called details scratched on to the surface; scrapped at my awareness and gave me more than the painting may have intended. 

It works like that, the paint, as if the intention doesn’t come from the hand of the artist, but from the agenda of the piece itself, but there’s nothing mystical. Just the place where Idea, composition, and reality meet and decide that peace is impossible. 

One element of the painting is field a pattern of floating purple syringes laid out over jellied squares and rectangles; interlocked by fuzzy connections, like neural axons. In between the coins and jelly grids are painted golden coins ringed in blue and red, and it is all seen from an aerial perspective; god looking down on the city in 1986.