Gil Heitor CORTESÃO (1967)

Gil Heitor Cortesão was born in Lisbon in 1967. In 1990 he obtained his Painting degree at the Escola de Belas-Artes de Lisboa (Lisbon Fine Arts School) and, in 1991-92, he attended the Academia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin (The Albertina Fine Arts Academy in Turin).

Among his first exhibitions, the ones held at the Galeria Módulo in 1998 and 1999, comprising small format drawings, and in 1992 at the Galeria Módulo in Oporto stand out. The latter consisted of boxes with several panes of glass, texts and acetates all in juxtaposition that heralded the importance that the relationship between the effects of transparency and surface would bear in his work.

After the Rosas Azuis 1996 (Blue Roses) exhibition held at the Botanical Museum (1996), having investigated the procedure for the previous two years, the artist adopted the procedure of painting on acrylic glass as his determining practice. At the aforementioned exhibition, one of the pieces represented, on the same pane, the facade and the back entrance of a house, thus summoning the issue of symmetrical reversibility and duplication of point of view towards the issues of inverted representation and reflection present in his paintings on glass.

Initially Gil Heitor Cortesão painted both sides of the glass as an opacity brought to the visual “window” and based on the actual experience of looking out of it in the studio. The later choice of committing the painting to a single side of the pane of glass allowed the artist to focus on that side, not only in his selected slices of the world (usually taken from photographs and varied images), but also on the paint and texture in a way that only allows the first layer of paint to be seen on the opposite side and prevents the observer from having any contact with the materiality of the painting.

Dançam Lebres na Selva (Hares Dance in the Jungle), an exhibition at the Galeria da Restauração in Oporto, 1998, greatly contributed to the public recognition of the artist. At this exhibition the artist presented pieces with fairytale-type references to nights populated by tiny fantastic beings and, in other instances, to urban spaces or to machines, deconstructed or incomplete, and placed in indeterminate locations. There’s a curious type of desertification in his work; void of a human element, the peculiar architecture that completes his cold, urban landscapes possesses a distorting speed and alien movement. Only in Rosas Azuis (Blue Roses) are the paintings Multidão 1 e 2 (Crowd 1 and 2) populated. This occurs only because they boast, in contrast to massive human dwellings, the quasi absence of spatial structure.

It is through the point of view that the possibility of an appropriation of those spaces defines itself to the observer, but only to him and in private: flying over, in “contre plongé” or trapped in the imaginary section of scenery where a transparent film impedes physical access, the observer is the only human landscape reflected on it.

The painting on this page depicts the puppy gazing at the house is himself made of the bones with which it is built, and materialises, in a point of view informed by desire, the projective condition of sight, its ability to strip reality in order to impose a transparency to what is essential to it.

In 2000 he was selected for the Prémio EDP de Pintura e Desenho (EDP Painting and Drawing award) and participated in a particularly interesting exhibition at the Exit Art Gallery in New York: Collector’s Choice. His last individual showing (Lisbon, 2003) consisted of painting swimming pools as deserted and cinematographic places, smothered by the dull light of nebulous memory that seems to envelope them.
 
In 2003, at his individual showing in the Galeria Pedro Cera, Gil Heitor Cortesão again dealt with the theme of deserted swimming pools, turning them into places of nostalgia lodged somewhere between distant fascination and the feeling of spatial circumscription. At the CAMJAP in June 2004, he exhibited 13 new paintings featuring a kaleidoscopic combination of the fairylike together with buildings, public spaces, crowds, advertising slogans and esoteric machinery.

LEONOR NAZARÉ