Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Interzona [Interzone]

Image caption
GIL HEITOR CORTESãO

Interzona [Interzone]

  • 2006
  • Oil on methacrylate painted on the reverse side
  • 42 x 60 cm
  • Cat. P_746
  • Acquired in 2007
By:
Jorge Pallarés

Amongst the numerous influences in Cortesão’s work, the reference to nature harks back to the early days of Le Corbusier, and particularly his notion of the landscape as decoration, an idea he would later abandon in favour of an urban development that was closer to futurism and more removed from Romantic ideas. In Cortesão’s work, that explosion of colour, of beauty, is enclosed, tamed in bourgeois spaces, in which man controls and subjugates the wild. In this case, the city - another of his principal themes - imposes itself on the viewer, like some vast container of soulless structures that has lost any relationship with the other. This idea is based on Le Corbusier’s own definition of the house as a machine for living in.

Interzona (2006) depicts a landscape typical of rationalist architecture, in which geometric figures are set alongside deformed colour fields that constrain the composition and set limits on the, perchance imaginary, city, which spreads across the surface of the picture. It is a bleak yet grandiose landscape, where the structures rising in the central part add mystery. This dreamlike quality evokes the large cities created almost from nothing in the mid-20th century, most of which lack soul and identity.

Jorge Pallarés

 
By:
Beatriz Herráez
Gil Heitor Cortesão
Lisbon 1967

Gil Heitor Cortesão studied art in Lisbon in the 1990s and has been exhibiting his work from early in his career. His oeuvre is noted for the use of a technique that consists of applying paint on Perspex, enabling him to project and construct his images “inversely”. As art critic Óscar Faria put it, “using methacrylate, a transparent material, also allows him to reinforce the liquid dimension that emerges from his work”. One might add that it is precisely that atmospheric quality – in which the material limits are blurred but also those of the space and time in which the images are located – that gives these paintings their capacity to create a feeling of estrangement and melancholy in the viewer. This effect generates discomfort and unease, reinforced by the recurrent themes of his images; a collection of interiors and exteriors referencing the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s and natural spaces. These locations are almost entirely devoid of any human presence, with at most a solitary figure or a group of unidentifiable subjects.

Gil Heitor Cortesão’s work has been exhibited frequently at galleries in Paris, Lisbon, Dubai and São Paulo. His pictures have also been included in shows at institutions such as the Cibeles Centre (Madrid, 2014); the Alcobendas Art Centre (Madrid, 2014); the Fundação Serralves (Oporto, Portugal, 2016); the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg 2007); and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2004 and 2016).

Beatriz Herráez

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.