CARBON 12 is delighted to present their 100th exhibition, All That Is Solid, Gil Heitor Cortesāo’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Portuguese painter Gil Heitor Cortesão (b.1967, Lisbon; lives and works in Lisbon) presents a suite of large and small works extending his investigation into the fragile perceptive systems and architectures of modernity. Working with oil on plexiglass, Cortesão constructs images that hover between coherence and dissolution, framing painting as a system at once striving for and resisting cohesion.
At the heart of this new body of work lies the artist’s ongoing archival process: photographs of modernist interiors and glass structures, reconfigured and filtered by color, space, and mood. These environments unfold as liminal spaces where the boundary between inside and outside dissolves: gardens seep into living rooms, reflections disrupt clear sightlines, and modernist transparency turns ambiguous. In Cortesão’s process, this conceptual slippage is reinforced formally. Reversing the conventional process of composition, he begins with details (plants, furniture, shadows) before filling in the surrounding space, generating a drifting tension in which figure and ground perpetually alternate roles. What should be stable becomes porous, reminding us that vision itself is never fixed but always negotiated.
The painting Glasshouse (2025), crystallizes this friction—its luxuriant foliage and modernist furniture are overlaid with arcs and painterly traces, as if the glass walls both enclose and dissolve the space. Transparency here is paradoxical: a structure of visibility simultaneously revealing and concealing.
In All that is Solid, Cortesão reconsiders the modernist dreams of coherence and control, revealing instead the fragility through which perception and memory layer.
-Paz Monge
