Romilios spoke with Federico
Cortese about his art and artistic goals. Federico Cortese was born in Turin,
Italy and graduated in Architecture and live and work as an artist.
What role does the
artist have in society?
I often imagine the
artists like sponges, or like the polyps creating the corals, small animals
able to absorb and filter something imperceptible from the water, and then able
to turn it into something completely different and unexpected. Certainly, there
is always the doubt that this process is in the end only useful to the artist
himself, and that perhaps no one else will be able to understand it, or gain
some knowledge from it.
What are you working
on at the moment?
I usually work on
multiple subjects, often very different from each other. At the moment my most
demanding work is a series of imaginary maps, and a collection of butterflies,
that are invented too. The link among these different subjects is the
experimentation of a variation on the same theme, and the search for the rule
that governs that variation.
What else should we
know about you and your work?
My main artistic
technique is oil painting, on stretched canvas or white fine art paper prepared
for oil painting. Usually my work proceeds with the sedimentation of several
layers, one after the other. And often each drawing or painting, belongs to a
wider series of works. In each series I try to explore and study a peculiar
aspect of representation, decoration and languages.
What are your goals
for the future, both work wise and life?
My only goal for the
future is to continue painting because this is my illness and my obsession. But
I have also the hope of continuing to travel a lot (even though this is also
related to my work as an artist because I realized that travel is a great source
of inspiration!).
What’s your favorite
piece of work that you have created?
This is not the best
work I have done, but I am very attached to this my old painting, which is
inspired by the novel by Franz Kafka "The Process". This was the
first job in which I began to understand how the process goes from inspiration
to creation. View the painting here.
Short CV
I was born in 1971 in
Turin, Italy, where I live and work as an artist. I graduated in Architecture.
Since I can remember I have always drawn. My preferred techniques are classic
oil on canvas paintings, and pencil drawings.
Artist Statement
I’m like a mouse in
its box. A little mouse safe in its shelter, that
passes his time gnawing the
food stored for the winter. But my food are the drawings. I work within my
home. My studio is a room of the house in which I live. In this relatively
small space are accumulated all the materials and equipment I need to draw and
paint, but in a certain sense also the suggestions that inspire my work. Here
are the desks and drawing boards, with brushes and paint colors, but also, on
the walls or placed in closets, paintings and drawings (I think each finished
work is always an inspiration for the next, in somehow). A great source of
ideas are books and music, and of course the PC. The graphics programs and
virtual modeling programs have become over the years a valuable support, but
obviously the richest mine is the internet: a reservoir of images and ideas
from which to draw, and in which we often are lost (in addition to photos of my
own travels, all stored on the computer).
It’s a small microcosm closed in on itself,
rather impervious to the outside world (despite a large window with a beautiful
view of Turin, almost always I work with the curtains closed). It is a bit as
if the suggestions of the real world were allowed to enter here only after
being filtered and digested, only after it has been already turned into
experience. Exactly like a rat, eating quiet its supplies in its den, waiting
for the end of winter.
Official site: http://lnx.federicocortese.com/
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