MANUEL FORTE
Oporto, 1978
Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico
A Portuguese-born and Mexico-City-based artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. Forte creates large-scale immersive environments utilizing all these mediums in concert– adding dimensionality to his artistic vision with his poetic use of found objects and an approach to murals that challenges traditional perspectives of where two-dimensional canvas painting ends and sculpture begins. Here, he poses the question, what is more important, the setting where the paintings are displayed or the paintings themselves?
Vibrant and and playful, his work feels aspirational and optimistic. Forte is an artist committed to the path forward, making the unknown known, and challenging himself to evolve in his practice whilst maintaining a sense of potentiality in his surroundings and materials. Forte seeks to create sensory experiences that the viewer can literally live inside, interact and relate with. In doing so, he reduces the sense of preciousness associated with art and invites the audience into his familiar yet novel worlds.
Forte plays with tradition in painting, creating a dialogue with the history of interiors, still life and landscape; subjects that he makes his own through his unique ability to create tension with painterly gestural interventions, unexpected compositional ideas, colourful patterns, paintings within paintings and subtle figurative suggestion. His work addresses themes of domesticity and fantasy, reflecting on how household environments can influence artistic production, giving a voice to the personal, daily and banal experiences we all share. Throughout this process he highlights the significance of quotidian life and our emotional experience of our family and friends, bringing these relationships and the sentiments they elicit to the front of his artistic practice.