There is a Cadillac logo in a lot of Cordt Holland’s work. It doesn’t make a big deal of itself — it just turns up, the way a familiar face does in a crowd, comfortable in its own recurring presence. Jayne Mansfield pops up too, rather frequently, all curves and confidence, sharing canvas space with fragments of mid-century advertising, futuristic architecture from the 1964 New York World’s Fair, snatches of colour and collage that cohere into something wholly his own. Ask Cordt why the Cadillac keeps coming back and he’ll shrug, pleasantly unapologetic. “It fits,” he says. “I don’t decide to put it in. It just comes up and gets done.”
This, in essence, is Cordt Holland’s artistic philosophy: instinctive, joyful, unencumbered by theory even as he is deeply steeped in it.
It began, as these things often do, with a mother who encouraged her young son’s fascination with art. Growing up in Dallas in the early 1960s, Cordt was taken regularly to the local museum — modest by international standards, but punching rather above its weight. “They had one Gauguin, one Jackson Pollock, and One Rothko.” he recalls. “It was a small museum, but they had good stuff.” His mother’s encouragement, combined with those early, formative encounters with 20th century modernism — Max Ernst, Picasso, Braque, Modigliani — planted something that would take many decades and a continent or two away to fully flower.
He studied art formally at North Texas State University, arriving in 1973 into a curriculum that, by the standards of the day, was reasonably conventional — mythology, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, the arc of art history from primitive to Asian to European. But it was his subsequent move to San Francisco that cracked things open. “Much more post-modern,” he says of the city’s art scene at the time. “Very different from Texas. Earthworks, performance art, trying to do unusual new things.” He cites Christo — the artist famous for wrapping entire buildings and landscapes in fabric — as an example of the kind of thinking that recalibrated his understanding of what art could be. “Post-modernism is experimental, exploratory. You leave behind the standard concepts about what an artwork should be.”
San Francisco shaped Cordt professionally as well as artistically. He built a career in video production and computer animation, later teaching at both the San Francisco Art Institute and the Academy of Art University. Among his credits, listed on IMDb, are Arise! The SubGenius Video (1992) — a feature-length work he describes as a major project — as well as Obsidian (1997). Commercial art ran alongside this, and it is here, in the visual grammar of advertising and moving image, that one can trace the clearest line to what he makes today.
But something was pulling him elsewhere. Cordt had first visited Bangkok in 1989, invited by a friend, and the effect was immediate and disorienting in the best possible way. “As soon as I arrive in Asia, I instantly felt at home,” he says. “I had always been interested in Eastern philosophy, Asian architecture — pictures of Tibet, India, Angkor. The aesthetics and the mysticism. It just resonated.” He returned several times through the early 1990s before the pull of work kept him in California. Then, in 2006, having obtained an English teaching certificate, he came back for good — this time to Chiang Mai.
He taught English in Lamphun and was, by his own account, too busy for art. For six or seven years, art was left behind, as Cordt dove into his exciting new life in Thailand. Then, around the time he turned 60, something shifted. “I just got the itch,” he says simply. He began making collages again — on wood, on paper, on cloth — layering paint and photographs into what he describes as “big abstract messes.” When the practicalities of buying supplies became tiresome, he moved the work to his computer, and in doing so, stumbled into the format that has defined him since. “That is when I shifted to what I call a pop art format.”
The results are vivid, layered, immediately recognisable works that draw on the visual culture of his boyhood with an artist’s eye and a technologist’s precision. The 1964 New York World’s Fair looms large — its monorails and corporate pavilions and intoxicating promises of a gleaming future — as do the pages of Life, Look and National Geographic, those great glossy documents of mid-century American optimism. “When you are young you just see the magazine,” Cord reflects. “You don’t know that a team slaved over it. It appeared easy, pretty, visually stimulating, hopeful. All of it was very upbeat.” He pauses. “In 1968, it all changed.”
His influences, when he lists them, form a rather distinguished lineage: Joseph Cornell’s mysterious box assemblages, Max Ernst’s surrealist collages, the Dada movement’s gleeful dismantling of convention, and the pop artists who turned commercial imagery into high art. Andy Warhol’s name comes up — people often draw the comparison — but Cordt is quick to clarify. “I am not copying him. But my experience in commercial art, like his own, drew me to pop art.” The distinction matters to him. What he shares with Warhol is not influence but parallel formation: both men were shaped by the visual language of advertising before they turned it into something else entirely.
He also cites Thomas Pynchon, the reclusive post-modernist novelist, as a significant intellectual presence — an interesting reference that hints at the literary and theoretical currents running beneath work that, on the surface, looks simply like tremendous fun.
And it is fun. This is perhaps the most striking thing about Cordt Holland’s art: it refuses to be bleak. “It is entertaining,” he says. “Nothing cynical about it. It can appeal to kids. It is fun and vibrant and unapologetically positive.” In a contemporary art world that sometimes mistakes obtuseness for depth, there is something almost radical about work that simply wants you to feel good.
The Chiang Mai art scene has received him warmly. He has shown at Sangdee Gallery, Chai-yo, the top floor of Maya Mall and twice at the Chiang Mai Museum of Natural History at Mae On. La Luna Gallery — his original ambition — eventually came through too. He is characteristically matter-of-fact about the arc: “I wanted to have a show but dreamed of it and didn’t know if I could. La Luna was my aim. I got a show at Sangdee first, then at Chai-yo. Eventually I got into La Luna.” He has ambitions beyond Chiang Mai — Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong — and the work, bold and immediate as it is, seems well suited to the pace and appetite of larger cities.
When he is not making art, Cordt plays Gypsy jazz around town — music from the swing era, another love rooted in an earlier, more glamorous century. He lives alone, unencumbered, with hundreds of unfinished works perpetually in progress on his computer and on his table. “Always on the go,” he says, without a trace of stress about it.
There is something rather pleasing about a man who spent decades in the machine of the American creative industry — animation studios, art schools, video production — and then ups and decamps to northern Thailand to make fun, positive, Cadillac-logoed pop art in his spare time, answering to no brief but his own instincts and sense of whimsy. Cordt Holland does what looks good to him. And it’s all quite lovely.
20th Century art historian Jim Blake has written about Mr. Cordt’s work:
Cordt Holland is a signature 21st century artist. Holland’s thorough art training at the avant garde hotbed: The San Francisco Art Institute, and his 40-year exploration of the major tropes of Western picture-making fuel his intensely private, sublime obsession with iconic talismanic totems of the mid-Cold War American dreamscape. Holland’s deep understanding of oil painting technique, draughtsmanship, color, composition and computer graphics, give Holland a powerful array of tools for his subtly erotic, zeit-defining image-making.
Over the past decades Holland has created more than a dozen masterworks that are as much post-structuralist philosophical statements at the intersection of Barthes, Baudrillard, Debordand Deleuze as they are references to Cezanne’s destruction of the Renaissance picture plane, Braquasso’s Cubism, Duchamp’s reposition, and rhizomic Dada mind-scramble. Any one of Holland’s works could fuel a semester of discussion in a graduate philosophy seminar at Harvard or Duke. Holland’s Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles conflated with 50s pin-up icons Bettie Page, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg and the flashy motels and gas-guzzling luxury cars are the stuff of every swingin’ Rat Pack wannabe’s Las Vegas wet dream.
Holland’s recent (past ten years) paintings are a voluptuous carousel-collage, a Freudian field guide to the late 1950s and 60s American obsession with googie architecture, tailfins, bosomy babes rendered in a cosmically seductive palette of quantum hue.
Note:
It is rare in the world of capital A fine art that a painter is also an avant garde artist who has the art-world trifecta of a superb education in the historical facts of the case from Lascaux to Larry Gagosian’s latest, a career of art-making hands-on technical experience and the unrelenting drive of a man obsessed with beauty and a desire to share it with the world. This is Cordt Holland’s moment.
Jim Blake – Harvard GSD ’79
Author:
Station Point: Cezanne, Picasso, Braque: the birth of a Language The Bliss Engine
Distill the Zeit
Fracture 1000
website: jimblake.com
July 2, 2025
