Wallpaper

Galeria Pedro Cera is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by the artist Gil Heitor Cortesão. This is entitled Wallpaper, and is made up of the presentation of a long wall completely filled by several different parts (several different paintings), that together stand as a large landscape.

Landscape is not a usual territory for this artist, neither is the romantic aspect that this set of painting may suggest. However, neither romanticism nor even landscape, are the central axes for this exhibition.

Everything starts out with a black and white image of trees that Heitor Cortesão works upon on the computer. This is a small fragment that is multiplied, touched up, cut and mixed. Through this process a simple image is transformed into a sort of musical score. Before it becomes a painting it is turned into a pattern. A sabotaged pattern because it is never the same. And a forest is created starting out from a module. On the wall this stops being a landscape and become a game of forms, of colors, a composition made up of vertical lines.

We thus return to the games which are a characteristic of Heitor Cortesão’s work: Wallpaper can immediately be associated to architecture –one of the subjects on which he most works– and is also related to illusion –here establishing a connection with the history of art– another of his favorite subjects.

The forest is brought to the white walls of the gallery. The artificial receives the artificial. The reproducibility of the image, its serial nature, does not transport us into a forest but into the middle of abstraction, updating projects such as those of Barnett Newman. The image we find in the forest is not that of nature, but one of color and shapes.

The surface of his paintings is, as always, made of glass. The painting takes place underneath. For Gil Heitor Cortesão painting is a process of hiding, the creating of a curtain that at the end is no longer cut through by light, which now starts to emanate from within the work itself.