In his large-format oil paintings, Christopher Corso creates a painterly topography of the present in which visual fragments of the mass media, advertising images and urban architecture enter into tense relationships with existential pictorial figures. His compositions appear like collage-like sections of a mental city panorama – cross-fades of perception, memory and permanent media noise. The pictorial space always remains permeable: The expression oscillates between figuration and dissolution, between concrete body and symbolic void. The protagonists of his works – often isolated, distant, contoured, but not anchored in any scene – are projection surfaces of social alienation.

Their embedding in fragmented spaces points to a deeper narrative disturbance that does not dissolve but intensifies with each additional layer of the painting. Corso does not use oil painting as a means of mimetic representation, but as a critical instrument: he deconstructs surfaces, dismantles illusions, exposes psychological layers of depth.
His work is in the tradition of critical urban painting after 1989, related to positions such as Neo Rauch or Franz Ackermann, but clearly more introspective and media-analytical. Corso does not stage the spectacle of the present – he shows how it affects us.