VLADIMIR CORA: PROFILE
While working in a pharmacy in Mazatlan, Sincloa, Vladimir Cora discovered his true vocation as a painter while looking at the brilliant colors of an impressionistic painting. From that day, he re-directed his life and decided to make a first exploratory visit to Mexico City. He believed the depth of character of a would-be painter was not only simply from the environment in which a person lived but also from new spaces and dimensions which could fuel the inner passions.
His earliest childhood was spent by the beach of Novillero, intoxicated with the Pacific Ocean. Here he learned to see everything in a brilliant light; unique perspectives of color and movement enfolding houses and people, mountains and skies and shapes.
Cora attended his first school of painting and sculpture in Tijuana, and later at La Esmeralda in Mexico City. He was on a search for those who could give form to the tentative, fledgling expressions derived from the matrix of his memories in the countryside of Nayarit. The kinds of people, the colors of the fruits and flowers, the delicate poetry of local artifacts- all this would later be part of the transfiguring work of personal interpretation. In the heart of his abundant work particularly important and significant are the mountains, the ocean and the beach, geometric form, and smooth lines which characterize this region of Nayarit with mathematical proportion in a burst of colors like a symphony, tones and shades of tones. And above all this, the sun, vast, enormous and pervasive, a sun which shines on ancient churches, houses and fertile fields, which strengthens and gives life to all that is, like the sun of the ancient pre-Hispanics. In 1999, he opened a museum to share his work and work of important other artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, Sam Francis and others with the community.
One of his influences is Tamayo, the Latin American master who has filled the century with his outstanding works. From this input is derived the vigorous form of Cora’s painting and sculpture, and this same energy is found in his reliefs, drawings and engravings. His particular pleasure is expressing and underscoring anatomical detail (young ladies with multiple breasts like bowls of fruit) and the rhythmic play of figures and backgrounds integrated in these compositions, result in a fundamental equilibrium derived from his won self discipline. And this in turn has contributed to an original expression quite different from other artists.
Certain artistic expressions either consciously or unconsciously resemble pre-Hispanic sculpture: large noses, large swollen mouths, wide eyes with a look of astonishment, staring and above all, bodies with an imposing quality, like monuments, all the characteristics that make unique and different the sculptures of the pre-Hispanic period.
The search for broad subject matter, forms placed among powerful lines, inherited from the muralist who aspire toward the highest boundaries, is continually visible in the trajectory of Cora’s work. Master of his medium, his overall background accentuates his poetic synthesis, the free and alive expression which derives as much from a historically integrated view as it does from the depths of his own instincts. He finds his expression equally free in painting as in sculpture, in graphics, sketches and textiles. The intense color on oil paintings which currently take precedence on paper by way of underscoring the design and re-animating it powerfully, is color which took form in Cora’s first work in the 1970s. These works were samples of the structure used to enhance colors, which identifies the style of this particular artist. Tones are extended with great strokes. Horizontal lines are painted in sharp contrasts without doubt, in these works is the reflection of the artist’s country origin, passionate and romantic, at the same time a manifestation of his environment which to this day encircles his life and his house in Tecuala.
Return to Vladimir Cora