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.
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.
Federico Correa ... ..produces paintings that are inscribed within the great Spanish Traditions of Goya and Roman Catholic sensibility . The emotional flamboyance and intensity of his work are a reflection , so that he admits, of his own guilt-ridden attiude regarding his sexual identity. His vivid , yet ambivilent images of either carnivalesque or morbid , good or evil, strike a universal chord while at the same time testifying to the artist's Latino cultural heritage.
Homosexuality recurrently comes to the surface , if only as a narrative enclosed within more philosophical investigation of human existance. The male body , flaunting a huge erection , while lying on top of a birthday cake (Birthday Cake, 1988), is a signifier of both the family dogma 's grip, and the gay man's desire to escape from it. The body's severed limbs and the penis' reddened appearance are visual icons of homosexuality's stigma. The image, says Correa, "is soaked in [the] hypocrisy [of] Catholicism and family tradition . It is thickly coated with subdued violence , destruction and cruelty...al in the name of love!"
Correa's work is in fact ripe with symbols, though London said Correa does not like to be typecast as a symbolist painter. A fence in his painting represents not a geographical border, but instead Correa's belief that people are trapped in their own conditions.
Correa's Catholic upbringing is evident in his use of established Catholic symbolism. The colors blue and white reference the Virgin and purity in the Mexican bride series. Correa's paintings frequently feature animal symbols. Dogs, for example, symbolize St. Roche, protector of plague
victims in the Catholic tradition.
El Sabor
Mexicanidad, 2008
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.
