An interior and product designer, Pepe Cortés, with an extensive career recognised by several Fostering Arts and Design awards and a National Design Award, is essential for understanding an honest way of working in relation to the essence of the craft. His constructive excellence, meticulousness with finishes and discretion with materials and colours speak to us as a way of understanding the profession from the hands and the heart.
He was a student and professor at EINA who exuded perfection when it came to drawing and designing, and all his creativity in the workshop was imbued with the “know-how” that mattered so much to him.
After spending time at several design schools, he came to EINA in the first graduating class, where he discovered the adventure of designing and was able to rationalise all the knowledge he had already learned. This is how he enthusiastically explained it to me years later when he welcomed me into his studio, as I was also a student at EINA. We worked together for seven years, and I was always learning, which is what one must do when you are an apprentice alongside a master of his craft. It was the era of the Open Design Studio on Roca i Batlle street in the Putxet neighbourhood of Barcelona. At ground level there was a workshop, with the office on an upper level in the building. We drew plans and, without stopping, we went down to the workshop to saw wood, twist iron, make lamps and more, then we went upstairs again to make more plans that pursued excellence. In those early years he also worked with his partner Libby Cowell who studied with him at EINA.
Collaborations with Javier Mariscal led him to expand into the field of furniture design, in which he stood out with several iconic works that are already historical pieces in Catalan design. He collaborated for several years with EINA as a professor of furniture and product design. His interiors are classic examples of contemporary good taste.
He left us with the affable, but intentional, “sardonic” smile of a Barcelona resident with roots in la Rioja. He was paternal, silent and elegant, and a work of indisputable quality.
I owe the recognition, gratitude and intimate debt of an apprentice to a master.
Josep Aregall
