Franco Cortese Biography
Franco Cortese (1949 - ) was born in Giovinazzo, Bari, in 1949. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Bari. Painter, sculptor, set designer, he illustrated books and advertising posters, signed and created important sets including: “Il Perseo and Andromeda” by Laforgue for the theater company “La Tarumba”, “Pluto” by Aristophanes and “L’Assenza” by Jean Tardieu on behalf of the theater group “Moduloesse” of which he has been a member since 1976. He began his activity in 1972 exhibition by participating in numerous art exhibitions, in Italy and abroad. In 1998, on the occasion of the Bari Art Expo, the critic Giorgio Segato selected one of his sculptures for the Provincial Art Gallery of Bari. In 2003 he participated in the XV International Sculpture Symposium of Carrara, creating a monumental work for the local Technical Institute " Einaudi". In 2004 he officially joined the International MADI Movement and participated in all the events promoted nationally and internationally. For years, geometric research has been an essential part of his work which takes on multidirectional forms. Adhering to the MADI poetics was, and is, for Cortese, a natural continuation of his plastic proposals characterized by simple harmonious structures in space-time suspension, as the development of forms for clean cuts and sensual curvilinear movements and as germinations and free definitions of growth , of emblematic and vital occupation of and in space. In recent years he has simplified his interventions, reducing the form to the essential, to the contracting and unfolding of the sheet as an exploration of the folds of space and time. Furthermore, it selects authentically MADI elements with the aim of responding to a need for freedom, for excited constructive and design will, free from rigid and visually and mentally binding syntax.
