Federico Cortese

Artist Statement:

I was born in 1971 in Turin, Italy, where I live and work as an independent artist and as an architect. My main artistic technique is the use of classic oil colours, associated with other media and materials, such as graphite, coloured pencils, charcoal, inks and industrial paints. 
I mainly paint on fine art white paper or on cotton canvases. Usually my work proceeds with the sedimentation of several layers, one after the other. And often each drawing or painting, also if it is sold alone, belongs to a wider series of works. In each series I try to analyze and study a peculiar aspect of representation, decoration, of the languages and their formal rules. 
In my works I represent many different subjects: the cartographic representation, the figures in the manuals of medicine, the sheets of the herbals with their rules for the classification of the plants, the ancient manuals that collect all the known form of real and imaginary animals, the facial expressions and physiognomy, the pornography, the structure of flags, and so on. All these are languages owning their own lexicon; my trial is to isolate and reinvent that lexicon. 
I have sold my works on the net, as original unique handmade artworks () or as posters and reproductions on other products such as T-shirts (, ), dresses (), pillows and bags ().

Education:

bachelor in architecture, Turin's Politecnico.