Reverse glass painting

Gil Heitor Cortesao is a Portugese artist, who uses the almost forgotten technique of ‘reverse glass paining’: his works are painted on plexiglass instead of a regular canvas, and then sealed by a layer of white paint. The painting therefore is enclosed between a glass plate and a layer of paint. Its execution is reversed: that what is done last on a canvas is done first on the glass. This type of execution also means that tiny detail cannot be added later.

Cortesao’s works often have modernist houses as their theme: he shows these in an undone way, covered by stains. For him they represent the downfall of the modernist utopia.

Gil Heitor Cortesao: Remote Viewer #2, 2008