Samuel Costa (°1944, Los Angeles, United States) makes paintings, sculptures, installations and mixed media artworks. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, Costa makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
His paintings are made through strict rules which can be perceived as liberating constraints. Romantic values such as ‘inspiration’, ‘genius’ and ‘authenticity’ are thereby neutralised and put into perspective. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, he creates intense personal moments masterfully created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer round and round in circles.
His works doesn’t reference recognisable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By examining the ambiguity and origination via retakes and variations, he presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and Utopian constructivist designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed.
He creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. By applying abstraction, he absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.
His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, he tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and believes in the idea of function following form in a work.
His works are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, the artist leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, his works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
His work urge us to renegotiate painting as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies, he makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.
His works never shows the complete structure. This results in the fact that the artist can easily imagine an own interpretation without being hindered by the historical reality. By questioning the concept of movement, he seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life.
His works sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. With a conceptual approach, he plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense.
His works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.
His works directly respond to the surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences from the artist as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. By emphasising aesthetics, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.
His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, he creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.
His works isolate the movements of humans and/or objects. By doing so, new sequences are created which reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. By experimenting with aleatoric processes, he often creates several practically identical works, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested: notes are made and then crossed out again, ‘mistakes’ are repeated.
His works feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections which make it possible to revise art history and, even better, to complement it. Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, he tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.
His works are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, he formalizes the coincidental and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes, which are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream worlds, are frequently revealed as assemblages.
His works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. By choosing mainly formal solutions, he finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humour that echoes our own vulnerabilities. The artist also considers movement as a metaphor for the ever-seeking man who experiences a continuous loss.
His collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka.
Acevedo Hülsbusch Juana Joceline
Bidari Basavaraj Shrishail Bidari
Bonton Bonton Bontongone Nelly
Brasser Valentine Marie Caroline
De Torres Y Sandoval Ramón Argila
González Rojas Adriana Marcela
Hernández Hernández Alejandro José
Himmelsbach De Vries Domenique
International Resource Center For Art Cairo
Junior Dope Lord Illuminati Lives
Madam Cosmic Entrepreneur Mastermind
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Patil (inspirational Speaker) Rakxit
Patricia Smyka Fathermoonandme
Payanene Velasquez Junior Haminton
Pedraza Eodriguez Emma Angelica
Plasencia Magdaleno Juan Moisés
Rodríguez Briseño Gustavo Daniel
Salas Dominguez Mayra Alejandra
Sigurdardottir Johanna Kristbjorg
Vanto Dumisani Vanto Dumfiasco
Vishva Naedurana Pathirannehelage