MAIMI, FL.-Renowned artist José García Cordero, born in Santiago de los Caballeros (Dominican Republic) in 1951 and based in Paris since 1977, will present his long awaited solo show in Miami, titled “Full Optimist”, next Saturday, December 8, 2007, at Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery located in 2441 NW 2nd Avenue, during the “Gallery Walk” at the Wynwood Art District and parallel to the events developed during the international contemporary art fair “Art Basel Miami Beach 2007”.

Full Optimist is a collection of unpublished paintings, curated by ‘Lorproject’, that correspond to one of the recent and most illuminated periods of the artist, where the viewer once again faces the fascinating visual universe of García-Cordero with his characteristic language dealing with irony, loaded with black humor, in the threshold of the sinister, toned with an optimist view of existence.

Some of the works in this show are included in the new retrospective book of the artist titled “El divino yo” (The divine me), sponsor by the telecommunication company Orange Dominicana, containing more than 90 images of works created in the last 25 years of uninterrupted work by García-Cordero. The book will be available during the opening night.

As said by art critic Laura Gil: "García Cordero has had the genius to make out of self-portraits not only an exercise, of overwhelming lucidity and introspection. He has portrayed his time and has found rooted timely motives little less than universal; he has therefore absorbed cultural traditions, galas such as those from Sartre’s existentialism and other European ones, such as Nietzsche’s philosophy, besides rigorously and smartly expressing the anomy of hybrid and postcolonial cultures that enter into the postmodern world still not having reached complete integration with modernity ".

"But his highest genius has been that of recognizing and expressing the essential fragility of the wild. There is no greater violence than that of a wounded animal or that of a harassed animal. The violence that hunts us from everywhere, inside and outside our own selves, is the violence of fear".

The exhibition will be open to the public through January 30, 2008.