Adriano Costa: from white socks to Brazilian wax

 

First major solo exhibition by Adriano Costa in London – “Touch me I am geometrically sensitive”, at Sadie Coles HQ – closed last Wednesday, but a second solo show by the 39-year-old Brazilian artist from São Paulo opened two days after at Peep-hole, in Milan, under the title “La Commedia dell’arte”. This rare coincidence has drawn our attention, and even if at a first glance Costa’s object-based pieces may appear to an European audience too close to the ubiquitous phantom of Marcel Duchamp, these double exhibitions reveal how Costa’s work is easily adaptable to different social environments, and therefore able to unveil certain surprising, and maybe unpleasant similarities between them.

In both episodes Adriano Costa’s work is humorous, serious, poetic and ‘left field’ – suggesting an underlying disquiet with contemporary life, or, rather environments, political systems and even art itself, which the human condition has to make fun of at times.

Adriano Costa constructs his sculptures with ingredients from ‘around about’ and indeed he does. Some of the literal content, the materials and objects, from this collection and previous works, are homely or generally found in the neighbourhood or corner store, rather than purchased from the art supplies shop. But if in London alongside the pieces of carpet, clothing, bricks, pillows and a mattress, we find paint and metals, plus wood, collage materials and canvas – which are the typical mixed-media ingredients of the studio – at Peep Hole the materials are a consequence of a metaphoric process focused on specific “characters” (as the title suggests). In this case the characters of the Comedy are some Brazilian transsexuals living in Milan, or fake luxury items’ abusive sellers that the city is rich of. The bags and belts from Chanel, Fendi, Gucci and Prada put on display over a board of a fake black marble (the kind of material generally used in Brazil for gravestones) have been bought from an abusive seller in Genoa, while the 15 monochromatic steles occupying the third room of the gallery are as high as 15 Brazilian transsexuals, high heels included, whom the artist has personally met in Milan before the show.

Adriano Costa also constructs, rearranges and assembles, as the practice of the sculptor today is. Sometimes he composes 2D imagery, or collages text in the modernist tradition. In Milan there is a plaque, on which it is written “Brazilian wax”, addressing the typical Brazilian method of hair removal famous all over the world. In London there was even some paint on a variety of surfaces, including the ubiquitous plastic bin bags that are more likely to end up in a land-fill site than on a gallery wall. Is there a painter emerging from the sculpture? Well, no, for paint itself is yet another objectified substance that populates our particularly urban environments on walls (in protest), or on the roads (to impose order).

Fashioning art out of the materials that constitute the piecemeal world around us, Adriano Costa blurs the boundary between painting, sculpture-in-the-round and installation art, leaving categorization for the historians, as the artist collects, selects, makes, produces and presents his findings with a sense of ease and playfulness. He forms a material and conceptual language from objects and their arrangements and proximity to life. The signs and meanings, or perhaps matter-of-fact stories of the everyday, rather than anything too high-brow, suggests that Costa’s work is, in poetic terms, more Imagist than Surreal (London), and more metaphorical than documented (Milan). There is lateral thinking too, as a collection of white socks forms an organic structure in ‘Lotus’, or, in ‘Bartira – Suggestion for Furniture’, five ladders are transformed into a shelving unit that might be poking fun at the notion that our creativity is undermined by the availability of the contemporary ready-made artefacts that fill the marketplace. This is an aspect of Costa’s work that strongly remind us of Campana brothers’ design practice.

Simple, commonplace speech for the writer becomes the everyday object for the sculptor – a re-arranger of the chaotic or humdrum. Adriano Costa presents the ‘everyday’ with a freedom of choice that can feels positive, as he reconfigures objects and materials that invite the viewer to make sense of a new arrangement. For example, in ‘News for free, You better accept it’ (London), Costa experiments with printed words from the daily newspapers to make sense out of a bewildered and montaged world. The cut-out words and phrases are echoed in a contemporary poet such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ ‘Collage Poems of Drafts’, where the outcomes objectify thoughts and words as objects. But this positive feeling can quickly turn into a sad disillusion (following the failure of Lula da Silva and Rousseff’s promises), as the fake bags on display on the fake marble clearly prove if seen in a pretentious city like Milan.

Like many of his contemporaries, Adriano Costa, the contemporary cutting-edge avant-garde artist, develops his practice with debts to many Modernists – Picasso and Duchamp in equal measure. But Costa is not only making links and new interpretations for materials and imagery with his forbears, most especially the geometry and colour of Hélio Oiticica and the Neo Concrete artists from his native Brazil, but his developing achievements as a progressive Altermodern artist demonstrates that the post-modern impulse now enters a phase that digests, celebrates and encompasses the contradictions and contrasts inherent in our global village. Petty-ironic or cynical commentaries on traditions from art of the past are eschewed, as this developing trend in contemporary art practice encapsulates a hybrid version of Arte Povera, Neo-Concretism, Minimalism, installation, craft skills and assembled ‘found objects’ to celebrate life, and art, as one – where Utopia meets Dystopia.

September 11, 2019