Impossible to know how future art historians will categorize a painter like Cortès. Figurative painting has survived high abstraction and subsequent nonfigurative art, and he might be placed on a continuum that stretches back millennia. Or simply fall within European art, subcategory French, 20th c. Will he be considered on his own terms, outside any school, group, movement, century? We love pigeonholing artists, as if we must first know what to call them before we say anything about the work itself. Sometimes you just have to look.
Impossible to know how future art historians will categorize a painter like Cortès. Figurative painting has survived high abstraction and subsequent nonfigurative art, and he might be placed on a continuum that stretches back millennia. Or simply fall within European art, subcategory French, 20th c. Will he be considered on his own terms, outside any school, group, movement, century? We love pigeonholing artists, as if we must first know what to call them before we say anything about the work itself. Sometimes you just have to look.