The Fragility of the Modern

With the exhibition All That Is Solid, Carbon 12 celebrates its hundredth show and presents a new chapter in the pictorial research of Gil Heitor Cortesão. Born in Lisbon in 1967, the Portuguese artist has long explored modernist architecture and its interiors, capturing atmospheres suspended between order and disintegration. In his oil-on-plexiglass paintings, images emerge through a process that reverses tradition: details appear before the whole, leaves, reflections and furnishings take shape with clarity, while the surrounding context dissolves into chromatic vibrations and transparent layers. The painting thus becomes an unstable device, where perception never settles but continuously shifts across planes and surfaces. Cortesão works from archival photographs of domestic interiors, greenhouses and glass structures, which he recomposes through painterly stratifications. Interiors open onto exteriors and vice versa, erasing the fixed boundaries of modernist architecture. The effect is that of a fragile visual memory, conveying both the promise of transparency and clarity and the underlying sense of precariousness. With All That Is Solid, Cortesão reaffirms his ability to transform painting into a field of inquiry into the relationship between architecture, perception and memory, offering images that do not document but evoke, destabilizing certainties and inviting us to rethink the very notion of vision.