Gil Heitor Cortesão was born in 1967, Lisbon, Portugal, graduated from Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa where he lives and works.

Conceptually, he defines his task as an artist, to maintain alive utopian ideals from modernism expressed through interior design and architecture.

It does it by the practice of painting, specifically by the practice of painting oil on the back of the Plexiglas. This relatively rare, or not so often seen technique of painting, seduces with the slickness of the visible surface of the Plexiglas that hides the texture of the oil paint, and deceives the viewer, suggesting the presence of a photograph instead of a painting.

Although based on vintage photographic material found on books and magazines from the 50s, 60’s and 70’s, the paintings will end-up having little to do with the original source. Scratches, textured lines, drippings, scale changes’, distortion and blur, introduction and removal of objects, etc, etc, will make of this paintings new cultural objects, diverse from the original photos that provided the initial idea for its execution.

The ideas and ideals that motivated architects and designers to make their decisions on how a city should be planned, how a house should look like, how a living room should be designed to provide an harmonious living, how should objects and colors be chosen to serve the utopian ideals of the modern man, all this sort of questions are the nuclear subject of Cortesão’s work and what motivates his practice.