​Born in the late 1970s, contemporary artist and neo-muralist Fernando Corona grew up in and around Mexicali’s vivid and visceral street culture. Receiving a scholarship to study fine art, he traded tagging for painting, establishing himself as one of the city’s most prolific and promising younger artists. Corona became one of a core group—including Pablo Castañeda, Julio Torres, Marcela Perez Espinoza, Rafael Veytia and Odette Barajas—that exhibited frequently at Mexicali Rose, the innovative media workshop–cultural center–radio station founded by Marco Vera in 2006. After losing his large studio in 2010, Corona shifted his focus to creating large public murals. Muralism—so close in intent and execution to the tagging he’d done throughout his youth—was a form he’d never completely abandoned. But Corona’s reengagement with muralism has resulted in dozens of intense, complex works that, like Alex Israel’s 2012 mural in Venice for Various Small Fires gallery, exist both as conceptual paintings and public art. In the past year, Corona has created original large public paintings at Artists Space in New York, at Art Berlin Contemporary, in Budapest, Prague, and throughout Mexicali.

​When I visited him in Mexicali on January 28, he’d just returned from two weeks in Valle de Guadalupe, a farming region 30 miles southeast of the city, where he’d helped residents create a stunning mosaic mural in their plaza. In Valle de Guadalupe, he’d woken at 4 a.m. in a small shed without electricity to the sounds of the roosters. Our first stop in Mexicali was a two-story shelter for homeless migrants in the central city, overlooking the new highway that leads to the border.
​We drove around Mexicali all afternoon looking at art and talking for hours.

CHRIS KRAUS: ​I remember the black-and-white photographs Rafael Veytia took here. The organization Angels Without Borders (Los Angeles Sin Fronteras), they set this place up for people who are basically dumped on the Mexicali side of the border by the U.S. Border Patrol after failing to cross.
FERNANDO CORONA:  A lot of them come from the south, south of Mexico, Central America, and they’ve spent all their money trying to cross. The organization gives them a place to stay, and work if they want it, so they can save up to go home. Or keep trying again and again to cross. A lot of them want to do that.

You mentioned last week they’d commissioned a mural. Do you know what you’re going to do? [We’re sitting on the curb across from the two-story building, whose large louvered windows are guarded by ornamental black wrought-iron rails. We’re in the heart of the old central city. Slightly behind us, to the north, a new road to the border is under construction.]
I’m going to do a representation of the people who are living here, the migrants. My friend Karla Paulina Sanchez is making a documentary about the shelter, and I’m using some of her photos. Most of the painting is going to be portraits of the residents, but I’m thinking about using a lot of color, too. You see that big wall on the side? [Corona points to a concrete wall facing a vacant lot.] The new border line is going to be right over there, so when you cross, you’re gonna see that wall first. I’m thinking a lot about color. Maybe the portraits are black and white, but all around them, a lot of Mexican colors, a big, bright pink, guacamole green, I love those colors. The people living there now are going to help me. I’m doing a workshop with them. It will be mostly paint, though I’m thinking about getting some recycled materials, glass or mirror and doing some of the corners as a mosaic. Rafael Veytia introduced me to some of the people here. They have a rambling way of life, and I was glad to meet them. This woman, she’s known as “Chiquis,” came from the U.S., she is a citizen, but when her boyfriend got deported she came along with him. She goes back and forth. You see a lot of young guys living here, not too many women, mostly guys in their 30s.

The black-and-white shaded figures are a distinct part of your style. I remember them from the New York and Berlin murals. What’s interesting is, they aren’t strictly figurative the way portraits usually are in a mural. The people are painted iconic and flat, a bit like Alex Katz or Brian Calvin. They’re more figurations, or representations dropped onto a larger landscape. How did you arrive at that?
Yeah, that sounds pretty accurate. Since I was a kid, I liked the idea of mixing up different characters and stories. In my bedroom, the curtains had pictures of superheroes. And then I found a porno mag around the house—so I’d try drawing that, mixing up naked people from porn with Spider-Man. Of course I wasn’t that conscious when I was a kid. But later, I began to understand that these things have a deep symbolic power. Right now, I’m trying to do these really specific people who I know and our surroundings, and then give it a twist. It can be anything, maybe a T-shirt that says something about the area…

Fernando Corona

Something that makes the individual more iconic?
Yeah.

And the people, you usually paint them in black-and-white shadings.
Yes. Sometimes when it’s a big piece in the street, I try to do it full-color, because it’s more powerful. But the one here, it’s going to be figures surrounded by colors. You’ll see the colors from a distance, but if you are walking, you can spend a little more time checking out the black-and-white.

Have you been doing the black-and-white figures since you started painting outdoors?
Yeah, at first it was more about money—I did black-and-white only because it was cheaper! But I like the way it looks. It has more drama about it and so over the years I’ve kept it, because it gives things this sense of drama.

The first time we met, you were still mostly painting inside your studio.
When I started painting, people didn’t really appreciate the street-art, graffiti thing. So I kept to the studio. But in the last years, returning to work in the street, I realize this has a power that sometimes the studio work didn’t. People have told me some very cool stuff—that walking past the murals gives them a sense of peace, that seeing it each time they walk by makes their day. And that’s what I like. The feedback. Even if they erase the mural, people still have a memory of it.

After you lost your studio, you traveled awhile in Central America?
I was supposed to go to Brazil, but at the last minute there were some visa problems. So instead I changed my plans and ended up in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. I decided I’d do a piece everywhere I went on that trip.

Were they commissioned?
A couple of places invited me and asked me to speak, but a lot were illegal. And while I was traveling, I started to have a lot more ideas about how images can make an impact in the street. I really started to look at what worked, and what didn’t.

What did you figure out?
You don’t have to break your head around the idea! It has to be something simple, something everyone can understand. Also, it’s better if you can start and finish the piece in one day. The less time you spend on it—the more you can trust your original impulse—the better. Also, the bigger the better. And, finding a contrast—for me, it’s between the figures in black-and-white and the color. Most of my pieces are one image, instead of a bunch of stuff. If you have too much going on, it’s not good. If you have another idea, better to do another mural.

Like lots of people in LA, I’ve always thought murals were corny. Looking at yours made me reconsider the whole genre. Why do you think muralism seems so dated and corny in so many places?
Sometimes people get into it because they think it’s fashionable or trendy, but they don’t like the school of the street. And they don’t have anything to say.

Fernando Corona in front of one of his murals, photo by Armando-Ruiz

Or else what they’re saying is corny. An official history, even an official leftist history.
I don’t like Mexican murals that are historical. Sometimes I like them when they haven’t been finished—when you can just see the lines. But yes: For the murals to just tell a story? I don’t like that. Recently I read somewhere about a new interpretation of the cave paintings at Lascaux. You know how they used to think that the cave people painted to tell the story of how they have hunted, etcetera? Recently they’ve suggested the paintings don’t have a story. They were in love with the animals, they kind of worshipped them! They painted the animals to animate them. And I’m guessing those paintings were made by people who wanted others besides them to feel that intensity.

Top: Fernando Corona’s mural “Miradas en Transito,” at the Instituto de Investigaciones Culturales Museo U.A.B.C., 2012, Photo by Marco Roche
Inset: Corona working at Mexcali Rose gallery