“Slow process-fast painting”

Seven questions with Xavier Coronel

Volcanic Pink Landscape (Why is the whole world staring at me)

1. “Love the art, hate the art world”, says Kenneth Goldsmith. What’s the weirdest thing that ever happened to you in the opening of an exhibition?

Well, one of my recent clinchers with an artist I did a duo booth show at Arco fair was when we followed each other on IG, and her bio just said odio el arte (I hate art). I immediately felt what she meant and was like, hell yeah, I’m so happy I get to share my work alongside her, Maria Abaddon, an amazing artist from Peru. So yeah, I do feel certain rejection for the art world, and I hate artists who want to be artists. I believe it’s a mistake to want to be one. There’s a beautiful quote by Michel Majerus which is pretty accurate to this: “the art world is so sad because there are these people who make you feel like you’re worth nothing or the other who think you’re a genius. I don’t like any of it.” 

All openings are weird. I try to avoid them, I even wish I’d get to skip my own, but it’s always a group effort to make one, so you must go out of respect for the project, your family and friends. Maybe I’m trying to avoid something too weird happening to me at an opening. Art-related social interactions drain me, and openings, if they’re mine, leave me almost crippled for a week, and somehow people find me super extroverted and talkative in some cases idk; maybe it’s sort of an adrenaline hyperactivity rush, but I most certainly could live without openings, nobody really sees the work at openings.

Studio at CAC Quito for WBC

Studio at CAC Quito for WBC

2. If you could collaborate with any artist, who would that artist be, and what kind of artwork would you create together?

Right now, probably Harmony Korine, and we’ll be making performance pieces with self-made masked creature-puppets interacting with endemic animals of the US, like an animal road movie with no cameras.

3. Describe your process of work on any given day.

I hate routines and get bored very easily, so my procrastinate-self avoids routines, but I have to force myself to get work done on time because I'm mostly working for specific events/exhibitions. I do work more in that line of a group of pieces as a whole being experienced at the same time, in the same place, as opposed to producing a lot or every day and then pre-curate yourself to show something specific. I wish I was that productive and could make one piece a day like Wilhelm Sasnal, but I rarely can't. Mine is a rare breed of slow process-fast painting. So I can spend a day in the studio without touching a work. It’s a sort of chaotic precision process, where the research, the experimentation and the actual physical production happen mixed together like a film that keeps ending and beginning on a loop. And as I plan as little as possible the technical or plastic aspects of a piece, I can spend up to one year to finish a painting. For example, I once abandoned a painting in 2014 and finished it in 2021, I tried to finish it several times before, but it didn't work until it did.

Banshee V (Sniper I)

My process is very permeable to my immediate reality in terms of cultural ethos, so it's always about my obsessions at the moment, what I am consuming in video, text, music, and somehow how I project myself into those things. It's embarrassingly more autobiographically than it looks; that's why I intentionally charge any work I do with multiple exits, patches, veils of meaning so I can hide and the piece can engorge its own signs. 

4. I think you play a lot with the idea of the unfinished, which generates an interesting effect in your works, a kind of distortion or tension around something missing. But then, the process has to end at some point. How do you know a piece is finished or at least ready to be shown to the world?

I don’t, and they never are. I just leave them before I fuck them up cause in my thin layers of fabric and pigments, once I screw up, it can’t be undone. I guess I know it’s done when I feel I’m very close or even slowly start to mess up. There are lots of things that I’d like to keep working on; let’s say I had more plans for this certain area, but they just don’t work. They start to contradict the point, so they need to be abandoned, and to trust when to abandon is a leap of faith at some point. They are indeed big unfinished sketches, and in some deep part of me, I am proud of that.

5. Let's ask the neurotic question about identity... Do you feel your work is marked by the idea of you being a Latin American individual, or do you feel more comfortable with the idea of being somebody that creates from Latin America?

I am from Ecuador, I am Latin American and right now I'm not creating in Latin America, but what I do is Latin American art? Ecuadorian art? Yes and no.    

I don’t even understand who I am enough to feel a national or regional identity too strong to be connected. I can only say what I believe, what I question, and what I want to say, and that, of course, comes with my context as a South American-Ecuadorian-Guayaquilean individual. Still, the context for me is extremely relative as the focus of categorisation only in geographical terms shifts from neighbourhoods to continents to the whole planet, not to mention every other socio-political, spiritual, and psychological aspects of the context, so It's random western categorisations that can only be interesting when dwelled with specific functions and relevance to a particular analysis, work, theory etc. that includes the long problematics of the hegemonic views of the South, of the East. [The West is dead, HMLTD]. But what I do is always related to the context of my upbringing in Ecuador of course, I also have an Argentinian filmmaker in me; that's where I studied film before art. But what I believe is not in categorisation but in gateways and bridges, so it's like you communicate to the world with your experience to be linked up with other individuals with different contexts but similar experiences, creating a beautiful net of collective and shared contemporary existence, it's what art has always been since Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira, we just have overwhelmingly faster technologies for sharing.