Federico Cortese

I’m like a mouse in its box. A little mouse safe in its shelter, that passes his time gnawing the food stored for the winter. But my food are the drawings and paintings. I work within my home. My studio is a room of the house in which I live. In this relatively small space are accumulated all the materials and equipment I need to draw and paint, but in a certain sense also the suggestions that inspire my work. Here are the desks and drawing boards, with brushes and paint colors, but also, on the walls or placed in closets, paintings and drawings (I think each finished work is always an inspiration for the next, in somehow). A great source of ideas are books and music, and of course the PC. The graphics programs and virtual modeling programs have become over the years a valuable support, but obviously the richest mine is the internet: a reservoir of images and ideas from which to draw, and in which we often are lost (in addition to photos of my own travels, all stored on the computer). It’s a small microcosm closed in on itself, rather impervious to the outside world (despite a large window with a beautiful view of Turin, almost always I work with the curtains closed). It is a bit as if the suggestions of the real world were allowed...