about corder:
Born San Francisco, 1969.Trained by the late Senegalese painter, Ousseynou Sarr, his paintings incorporate the experimental abstract color and modernist style of artists like David Park, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko with the mixed media glue and pigment technique learned from Sarr and that is derived from West Africa. Other contemporary influences include Chris Ofili, David Walker-Barker and The Boyle Family.
The paintings are abstract and at the same time highly symbolic. An Afrophile, Corder chooses subjects from all that is near to him at his home in southwestern France near Orthez, and in the countries he has visited: women and children, families, spirits, african landscapes, villages, death, trees, couples, healers, old stones and walls, life. The materials include oil paint, varnish, glue, water, earth, ash, sand, string, collage, pigments. Utterly unique, the paintings defy boundaries. They are figurative and nonrepresentational at the same time. They represent landscapes as well but of another world: “the subconscious” or the “spirit world” or of dreams. The paintings are usually seen as both abstract and as containing distinct images of figures and other objects. The images could be seen as abstract landscapes but also as paintings of a specific place. the recent paintings from senegal are paintings of a village and a region and sample the locale itself with bits of collage of paper garbage found in the village.
After his education at Swarthmore College, under the tutelage of Randall Exon, the Philadelphia realist painter, Corder spent the next 10 years living in San Francisco, Addis Ababa and Songkhla, Thailand, including long travels in Africa and Asia. In 2001, he settled down with his family in les landes, France, where he works full time.
Each painting could be said to represent a portrait of a place or a portrait of a piece of earth. The places Corder has traveled to figure strongly in his paintings, each place offering its own influence: the incredible wash of beautiful light of San Francisco; the sea of bodies in the refugee camps of southern Sudan; the smell of an approaching storm and the shock of green in southern Thailand; the endless savannas of Senegal; the old walls and spirits in the grange where he now paints in France.
In 2005, Corder and his family spent five months working in Sarr's home village of Dielmo, Senegal. The resulting series was chronicled in Corder's first catalogue, "Cracks Like Rivers."
On living in France: "The beauty of Chalosse, of the Basque Country, is my daily inspiration. The West winds, the sun, the rain, the trees and plants - all of these find their way into the paintings. But so do the haunting images of figures - from a different, more internal landscape."
One of Corder's greatest concerns is that of the raising of his children and giving them a bilingual education and a global worldview. He and his family immensely enjoy the French people and land and are grateful to the French and Europeans, in general, for their way of life. The soil and countryside give his family nourishment and give his art inspiration...
