Timothy Close

Executive Director

Boise Art Museum

Federico Correa's large-scale paintings are visually compelling and emotionally violent and painful. They are filled with highly charged familial issues. These naratives  contain diliberate aspects of sexuality, incest, incertitude, provocation , death and expulsion. Therein lies the extreme clash of the traditional family hierarchy.

The figures in these paintings are anonymous but identified by their gender. Their roles  are abusive and exaggerated. Parental figures are often distorted and sometimes  appear as horrific  nurturing  animals. Childlike  figures  are nondescript. Their identity is portrayed  through a presence  of innocence. While these central figures  hover and occupy large  portions of the canvas, secondary characters are usually interwned  in sexually oriented positions. They collide physically and emotionally with one another as if in  a dream.

Samuel Hoi

Dean

Corcoran School of Art

Federico Correa achieves shattering impact through his highly personal paintings, fueled by early domestic experiences. The canvas is where he performs excorcism; anxious and angry charges are made against unrelenting  demons of the past and present, exposing  them to the light. The familial, sexual, religious and mythical references in his work are both targets and icons. While he mocks and slashes at the figures and conventions  which he once revered and now has learned to view as abusers and their instruments, he instinctively seeks relief and absolution within the same belief systems. As powerfully conveyd in his paintiong, Gabri-el, reclamatiion of power and declamination of identity are both painful and joyous.  The great poignancy in Correa's painting lies in the conflict between  the real and the ideal, the need to be free and the desire to be embraced. Long-standing faith and newly-found assertiveness, not despair, underlie the lurid carnality and heartbreakng frankness of Correa's work. He sees Dante's Hell the reflection of Paradise. 

Alex Bontemps

Freelance Art Critic/Educator

In the swirl of vibrant, emotionally charged color and its skillfully varied textures, there is great beauty. Most visible is not the outline of a particular life, with its sad memories and resolved fears, but the fear and desperation associated with life itself.

The Virginia Pilot&Ledger Star

5/88, Norfolk Virginia

 

Biography

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