Big colored butterfly

From the series “Please do not kill butterflies”, pins, oil and pencil on paper, 30 x 20 cm.                                                                                                                                          

Please, all these dead animals ... Of course, not everyone of us can or want become vegetarian. Sure, in some cases, maybe, the medical experimentation needs them to get results. But we really have to kill them for our frivolous activities? ... Is it necessary to have so many pink pigs die in front of a camera? Do we really need to dissect sharks in formaldehyde, to starve stray dogs tied to a chain in the corner of a gallery, or to make innocent ants go crazy in twisted tubes of plexiglass? 

To make these drawings, no butterfly was killed. ORIGINAL SOLD

LANDSCAPES WITH GARBAGE

(original sold)

I’m afraid that I have never seen in my whole life a place that was totally devoid of garbage or waste. Like the majority of people nowadays, I have traveled quite a lot, and in all the places where I've been, even in apparently pristine landscapes, such as high mountain paths or natural parks, there is always the memory of some garbage. Maybe hidden, perhaps barely visible and half buried, faded by the sun and worn out from the weather, mainly plastic, now part of nature.

In the countryside of southern Italy, especially in Puglia, just digging in the ground it is very easy to uncover relics of ancient Greek civilization: pieces of amphorae, shards of pottery, coins. It's too easy to say that this was a refined civilization, so that we still consider its waste like works of art, while ours is a barbarian society that submerged the planet of trash. Will we arrive at the point of saying that the difference is only quantitative?... Will it happen, in a near future, that we will come to replace the ruins of antiquity with the scraps of our consumerism?

MERCURY

MERCURY.

From the series “Imaginary portraits”, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm, 2000. ORIGINAL SOLD.

SISTINE MOOD

from the series “Sistine mood”, oil on paper, 42 x 29.7 cm, 2015.

This series of drawings was inspired by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Some portraits are directly based on the figures painted on the vault. Then I painted other faces trying to reproduce that style, and the characteristics that in my opinion distinguish it: the intense expression of the faces, the light and half transparent colors as if the aim was to let emerge the underlying drawing, the profile marked by a darker line, the background of a mostly uniform sky.

Original available for sale.

www.saatchiart.com/ico71

CIRCULAR DIAGRAMS

From the series “Diagram”, pencil and oil on paper, 44 x 50 cm.

In my youth at the school, certain lessons were inevitably boring. When the distraction peered, inadvertently I began to scribble the pages of the books, filling with drawings their blank borders. The hour of history, or philosophy, gave easy ideas: I copied the portraits of philosophers illustrating the beginning of each chapter in the textbook. The math class gave beautiful diagrams: their geometries structured the space, providing backgrounds to fill with decorations, figures, pictures. Maybe it was the insight that those same geometry hid himself a sort of aesthetics, an inexplicable and axiomatic beauty, like when we are aware of it in front of nature, without being able to give it an explanation.

This sort of drawings make me think of a kind of prayer, a repetitive but pleasant action, like the work of an embroiderer, like a spider weaving its web.

Original available for sale:

www.saatchiart.com/ico71

https://www.artfinder.com/federicocortese

http://www.zatista.com/store/index/federico-cortese#seller_id=16003&page=1&sort=10

BRASIL

Original available for sale:

http://www.zatista.com/product/details/49049/Brasil

From the series “Flag”; oil and graphite pencil on canvas; 50 x 75 cm.

Every time that I come back home from a journey or a holiday, I always find, among the photographs that I’ve took, some flags. I am particularly fascinated by those flags moved by the wind, where the geometries of the coloured tissues overlaps on the spirals of folds and on the shadows generated by the movement. It’s even better if the flag is old, maybe a bit ripped, marked by the time that they spent to wave, maybe a little faded or dirty from the dusty air they crossed.

GERANIUMS

from the series “Botany’s notebook”, oil and pencil on paper. 30 x 44 cm, 2015.

These are the plants that I grow on my balcony. I have a small balcony with a few pots of flowers, and these are the things I see more when I'm sitting at my desk, and every time I look up from the drawing I'm doing, out of the window, this is what I see. I get distracted, but the distraction brings me right back to the need to draw, so I take another piece of paper and try to sketch the plants, their colors, the shadows and the light reflections dancing on their leaves. When I go back to the work I was previously doing, a little bit of these sketches is transferred in it, and this tells me that my drawings (my thoughts), though apparently distant and very different from each other, talk, communicate and transmit the information all together.

Original available for sale.

www.saatchiart.com/ico71