"Today, the names Cordell Cordaro and Rachel Cordaro are at the top of Rochester’s art scene. Talk with nearly anyone in Rochester who holds even a marginal interest in art and she knows of the Cordaros'. Cordell’s swanky portraits of the bourgeois lifestyle hang in restaurants and bars across this city and beyond; Rachel’s beamish blossoms are sold by the number in Rochester’s high-end boutiques. As an art collector, it’s hard for me to choose which of Cordell’s posh beau monde I like best, and I’ve fallen into the habit of switching out Rachel’s floral canvases as if they were a vase of fresh flowers plucked weekly from the backyard garden. The fortunate problem becomes which to choose and where to hang it next. "- Pam Emigh-Murphy
"Cordell’s women, at once beautiful and shocking, reveal a campaign against the standardization of beauty given to us by the ancient Greeks. Cordell is a modernist. His women (and men) self-sufficiently and unself-consciously inhabit a world of their own—an unconscious striving that motivates many of us—but their exaggerated and sometimes distorted depiction ruptures our classical notions of beauty. Beneath their elegant, civilized veneer, you will find that his subjects, whether male or female, deliberately display their interior longings, their idiosyncrasies that would otherwise be squashed by social decorum. They teach us that people can’t be viewed only in terms of idyllic outward appearances."
Excerpt from issue one of Art House Press magazine
Written by Pam Emigh-Murphy