Gil Heitor Cortesão

Gil Heitor Cortesão’s paintings look to the design aesthetic of the 1960s and ’70s, depicting spaces characterized by clean, hard lines and generally devoid of human presence. Working off images from ’60s interior design magazines, Cortesão paints layers of paint onto Plexiglas and presents the reverse side of the work when he exhibits them, creating a muted, dream-like quality that suggests the decline of the utopian promises of the Modernist era.

“I want to get the viewer to feel that they’re at a distance, to enter these spaces as if they’re in hypnosis,” he has said. Cortesão establishes a sense of unease in his paintings by pointing to the disintegration of these environments; artworks peel off walls or natural elements overrun interior spaces. “That which was probably futurist at that time, now seems retro-futurist orBorn 1967, Lisbon, Portugal, based in Lisbon, Portugal.