filipe cortez
Saudade

Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgia or profound melancholic longing for something absent or someone that one loved. Essentially, it means missingness. Moreover, it often carries the burdensome knowledge that the object of longing might never return. A stronger form of saudade might be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, and well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one re-live those memories again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone or something that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings together; sadness for the missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.

In a city where almost all the heritage is erased or destroyed, it’s easy to feel this sentiment that something is missing, it’s no longer there. This place, neighbor, or house was replaced for a new condo, empty of history and memory.

Through the work presented you can have something that still keeps this place alive. Even when it’ll be gone. These membranes or skins, as Cortez calls it, they have the dust of the buildings, the remnants of paint, nails, forms, textures, colors, aesthetic, to fill the void of missingness.

Biography

Filipe Cortez was born in Portugal in 1986, and currently lives and works in Porto and New York. He holds a master’s degree in painting from the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto, graduating with the best classification, and a bachelor’s degree in painting from the same institution. He has been exhibiting regularly since 2007; highlights include his recent exhibitions in New York City and STUPIN.ORG (2017) in Taipei. In 2015, he completed a six-month artist residency at the Residency Unlimited (New York), from which many collaborations with galleries and curators sprouted. Cortez works within the fields of painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation in his examination of memory and architectural spaces. The multidisciplinary approach has become increasingly evident in his work, for which he has received various awards and honorary mentions.

Filipe Cortez