Diagram
par Federico Cortese (Italie)

An original piece from the series “Diagrams”, oil on thick paper, 30 x 50 cm, 2023 (original sold).

In my youth at the school, certain lessons were inevitably boring. When the distraction peered, inadvertently I began to scribble the pages of the books, filling with drawings their blank borders. The hour of history, or philosophy, gave easy ideas: I copied the portraits of philosophers illustrating the beginning of each chapter in the textbook. The math class gave beautiful diagrams: their geometries structured the space, providing backgrounds to fill with decorations, figures, pictures. Maybe it was the insight that those same geometries hid a sort of aesthetics, an inexplicable and axiomatic beauty, like when we are aware of it in front of nature, without being able to give it an explanation. This sort of drawings make me think of a kind of prayer, a repetitive but pleasant action, like the work of an embroiderer, like a spider weaving its web.