“Slow process-fast painting”
Seven questions with Xavier Coronel is part of a short interview series with Latin American artists. It intends to get closer to the person behind the artworks. What's on their shopping list, what podcast they are listening to, what is the strongest memory from their childhood...all the ordinary life stuff that also informs and shapes their creative practices.
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 WBC2. 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.
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.
Studio at CAC Quito for WBC4. 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.
Studio in Guayaquil5. 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.
Banshee V (Sniper I)6. We really like your post-apocalyptic landscapes. If you were to create a soundtrack to accompany one of your artworks, what kind of music or soundscape do you envision and why?
"Burn fat and build muscle" by Carnivor, it's a song by a friend's duo band. I don't think they even are on SoundCloud or anything really, but it's sort of violent electro-ambient? I don't know, it's close to the theme of a doomed antihero movie. As a matter of fact, I do see my landscapes soundtrack being the score to Terminator 2, with an occasional outburst of Brockhampton poppy nostalgic rap songs, I've been told it's silly but I love them. I love how they did a fast oeuvre of pure, effortless virtuosity for ten years. They took the queer, sad, love, anger, feel-good, and dark to really interesting places. They kinda did it all in their own language. I'd like to die in a landscape where the song "Goodbye Horses" by them will be playing from the sky, sort of distant or partially muffled.
7. Finally, let's test your faith in humanity. Do you think this questionnaire was created by ChatGPT or by us?
Oh, I know the power of that specific AI and it's scary, and of course once (you) provide the information for a formulation, so, now that you put this in my brain, I think you, in fact, ChatGPTd this. It's in the little words and tone. Like the head of my MFA, Chus Martinez, said in a radio interview recently, we do need indeed AI that is not formal or the equivalent of somebody sitting at a desk in a suit, following rules; we need chaotic, mischievous and creative AI, rebellious, capable of imagining/creating new worlds. Hopefully, they'll do it better than us.
The Lost WRLDXAVIER ANDRÉS CORONEL (GYE 1988)
Xavier Coronel is an Ecuadorian Artist with studies in filmmaking at Centro de Investigación Cinematográfica (CIC, Centre of Cinematographic Research) Buenos Aires, Argentina 2011 and Visual Arts at Instituto Tecnológico de Artes del Ecuador (ITAE, Art Institute of Ecuador) Guayaquil 2016, with a degree in Painting and Video.
His work focuses mainly In Painting, Drawing, Video and Film, with an obsession with language and structure as a meta narration through the creation-revisitation of somewhat discarded images exploring Cultural Schizophrenia, Cinematographic Horror, Humor, Memory and Nostalgia, with a constant interest in language and structure as a meta narration through the creation-revisitation of images. His short films have been part of the official selection of festivals like BAFICI in Argentina and Cine/B in Chile. His work has been part of numerous collective shows in alternative spaces, Museums and Galleries such as NoMinimo, Dpm in Guayaquil and No Lugar in Quito. His first solo show Omari Fox Bay was in October of 2016 in Dpm Gallery, where he did various exhibitions, including his third solo show Nostromo (2018). His most recent solo exhibition was Wonder Boy Complex* produced by Eacheve at the CAC in Quito (Centre of Contemporary Art) Nov 2021-Feb 2022, which gathered fourteen large-scale paintings.
His last solo show DUMBANGER was at Ginsberg Galería viewing room in Madrid on Sept 2022. Coronel is currently doing an MFA at the Institut Art Gender Nature of the FHNW in Basel, with 25 artists selected worldwide.
He currently lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.
