In Plain Sight: Isaac Cordal Creates Tiny Worlds Which Mirror Our own
Not many young Americans outside the Appalachians have spent time mushroom hunting—stomping through muddy countryside to a coveted location, pushing back the dripping boughs, crawling into the underbrush to reach an oak tree. The practice has faded with urban generations reared on a steady diet of globalized Big Macs. Still, a few predacious mycophagists can be found among the young people of Europe and East Asia.
“Actually, I really like to go mushroom hunting,” says Spanish artist Isaac Cordal whose work is most often executed in concrete—the stuff, he claims, that humanity’s footprint is made of.
“When I look for places in the city to locate my sculptures, or take photographs, it is a bit similar to [mushroom hunting]. I like to observe the city with that gaze for little details.”
We are not surprised to learn that Cordal is a mushroom hunter. Not because he hails from Galicia, with its sea-food rich coastlines and moist mushroom-friendly interior. Nor because his studio looks out “a large window, over a small garden inhabited by a very friendly rabbit.” Nor because Cordal’s sculptures are themselves only about six to nine inches tall, the size of a very fine cêpe. No, we aren’t surprised Cordal is a mushroom hunter because his work is, at root, the art of a modern man in revolt against the modern world, with all the alienation, guilt, greed, fear, and existential anxiety—not to mention climate change, refugee crises, and state surveillance—it has wrought. And because the age-old skill of mushroom hunting is invaluable to finding his work in its native habitat.
In the same way that lovers of street art attune their awareness to the urban canvas entirely unique among daily commuters, mushroom hunters shift their attention from everyday midfield vision, to the rarely explored ground and heights. Lovers of Cordal’s work must do all of these things. Because if you keep your eyes forward, as your teacher so often demanded, you will miss one of Cordal’s tiny forlorn figures peering over the ledge of second-story filigree in Brussels; and, if you fail to consider the treasure troves of city cracks and crevices, as your parents instructed, you will miss a similar little man sitting in the middle of a NYC storm grate, with his briefcase on his lap and his feet dangling over the dank abyss below.
Unlike so much of the bright, bold, beautiful urban art that has come with ever greater commercial acceptance and devotion to technique, Cordal’s street work is dark, dour, and easily missed, driven purely by ideas and very big human problems. And distilled down into something concrete and very small.
Cordal’s most common character—a white, middle-aged man with crumpled gray suit and balding pate—is the epitome of Western businessman. He has proliferated Cordal’s work for many years. The location doesn’t seem to matter.
“I have this idea that modern cities today seem to be just extensions of each other,” says Cordal, “the big capitals could be neighborhoods, forming part of an international mega-city: here New Yorkers, here Londoners, here Parisians…”
We can discover that there is water on Mars but we cannot solve the water supply problems on Earth. We have overproduction of food but there are millions of hungry people in the world.”
But the message is almost always the same: Freedom and happiness do not this way lie.
“The model of life that we have, based on neoliberalism, is a madness,” says Cordal. “Politics has become a business that devastates everything, a kind of economic terrorism legitimized by the idea of democracy.”
In 2013, Cordal’s elemental little gray businessman was given an epic showing when the artist was invited to position a massive iteration of Follow the Leaders outside the Place du Bouffay in Nantes, France, a city once known as the European epicenter of the slave trade. The installation spread out over a 65’ x 59’ lot of dirt that was wired for electricity, and consisted of about 2000 sculptures.
At once absurd, like an over-sized sandbox with its own adult toys, and utterly distressing, Follow the Leaders offered a bird’s eye view of a stone-gray modern wasteland occupied by groves of tiny tree stumps, piles of rubble, and Brutalist-style concrete-block architecture. Cordal’s businessmen clutched their brief cases and peered out of shattered windows. A few stood on top of miniature hills overlooking the devastated landscape, scratching their heads in confusion while their colleagues milled about.
Most, just got on with their day: They waded through piles of dirt while furiously talking on their cell phones, making deals; some attended seminars and speeches where a nearly identical businessman pontificated, even as his crowd seemed to slowly sink into the dust; some approached soldiers, who marched through their tiny town, peering into gas masks as if to seek direction, instruction, a new guideline for business as usual; one group lurched zombie-like toward a brightly lit pocket-sized lamppost, their unshakeable belief in the power of technology made unmistakably clear.
At night, the tiny streetlights and miniscule cell-phone screens which illuminated Cordal’s ashen faces, turned Follow the Leaders into an eerie ghost town. By day, the exhibit was a clear metaphor for what the artist views as the failures of capitalism and the unchecked march of “progress.”
More often, though, Cordal travels light, with a couple clementine boxes worth of figures that can be painted and dressed when he has stumbled upon the perfect location.
Cities are his character’s most “natural habitat” where, Cordal explains, the standard of living has little to do with the quality of life.
“That’s a serious problem,” he says.
One which his little businessmen make evident. These sculptures often appear without fanfare, alone or in small groups, faces etched by workaday stress. They heedlessly follow their corporate bosses into the deep dark depths of rain puddles, and text madly as rafts of refugees drift by in gutters; they cling to cell phones regardless of sinking canoes, and face rising seas with ineffectual floatation rings; they tow the line, even when it’s merely a shadow or a crack; they march mindlessly into storm drains which look like yawning factory gates.
“Progress should be oriented toward creating just societies,” continues Cordal. “We can discover that there is water on Mars but we cannot solve the water supply problems on Earth. We have overproduction of food but there are millions of hungry people in the world. We can manufacture a last generation’s weapons and we still wonder why there are wars.”
While seemingly blind to the contradictions, Cordal’s little businessmen are not always villains. In fact, it is often clear from the lines on their face, the indicative hunch of the shoulders, the desperate hollows in their cheeks that many of them do their “bread jobs” under duress—equal parts compulsion, coercion, and fear. It is not uncommon to find these careworn men considering a fatal leap off a utility line or ruminating over a small grass-covered grave within a natural fissure in the asphalt.
“And progress is lost inside these large shopping centers that surround us,” says Cordal, “inhabited by luxury cars… by plasma TVs, and the next generation of cell phones.”
In Urban Inertia, a recent exhibit in Montreal, we find one ill-fated fellow literally caught in a mouse trap that has been baited by a briefcase. Nearby, his colleagues sit in tidy rows within the bowels of an old file cabinet being indoctrinated by a presenter in gray.
[He] stayed there under the snow for several days. It was hard to understand how these things can occur in the so-called first world.”
Kafka, we think, would be proud, then probably embarrassed by the public display. There is a rusty toolbox filled with tiny scientists peering into one man’s skull, and another with businessmen being buried alive while they await instructions. Fear, suggests Cordal, is a powerful form of social control. Better to do nothing than risk embarrassment or profits.
Unfinished People, a series Cordal placed on the streets of New York last winter, probed the seismic cracks in such a system. Inspired by his first visit to the city, the series took shape when he saw a homeless man blanketed in snow.
“I was very surprised by the amount of homelessness I saw,” recalls Cordal. “But I remember especially this homeless person leaning against a railing with a blanket covering his body… [He] stayed there under the snow for several days. It was hard to understand how these things can occur in the so-called First World. We have reached a point that is too extreme in its insensitivity.”
To bear witness to the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, Cordal recreated a few all-too-familiar scenes in miniature and left them where people might look: a bundled woman on an old mattress with sad eyes, holding her kid on one knee; an old bearded guy with a blanket draped over his head; a new street kid with a knit cap, his dog, and a book, huddled against the chill. Cordal’s most desperate businessmen also made their way into this series: one wrapped in a thin red blanket landed near the railroad tracks in Brooklyn; another borrowed warmth from a subway vent; a jowly stockbroker type dragged himself out of the Hudson River, while another considered jumping in; tiny bodies bobbed in a puddle near Rector Street, and one lay face down on the sidewalk just under a downspout from which he has been permanently expelled.
“These are the people that do not fit into the system,” says Cordal, “people [who cannot] adapt to a type of society in which we are only useful if we are productive.”
Lucky passersby who noticed, stopped to take pictures of the Unfinished People with their cell phones. Of course they did. The pieces are touching and true. And safe. A person can peer into Cordal’s tiny faces and experience recognition, even pain, without the real risk of connection.
Admirers might even pick up these figures and take them home—these works, are, after all pocket-sized. But hopefully the work did not disappear before Cordal’s point was made. Hopefully a thousand people noticed the tiny haggard businessman on his knees in front of a large urban toadstool—a bright red plastic plug rising on the stalk of a small oxidized pipe. Hopefully, they understood the face of anguish that comes with the loss of irreplaceable things.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 39, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue of Hi-Fructose by subscribing here.
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