{"id":8267,"date":"2014-09-29T18:06:23","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T16:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?p=8267"},"modified":"2019-09-11T12:45:19","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T10:45:19","slug":"adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/","title":{"rendered":"Adriano Costa: from white socks to Brazilian wax"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t<style type=\"text\/css\">\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 {\n\t\t\t\tmargin: auto;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-item {\n\t\t\t\tfloat: left;\n\t\t\t\tmargin-top: 10px;\n\t\t\t\ttext-align: center;\n\t\t\t\twidth: 33%;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 img {\n\t\t\t\tborder: 2px solid #cfcfcf;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {\n\t\t\t\tmargin-left: 0;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t\/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes\/media.php *\/\n\t\t<\/style>\n\t\t<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-8267 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/04_selected\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/04_selected-480x320.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-8868\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-8868'>\n\t\t\t\tAdriano Costa, International Division of Labour &#8211; 1, 2014. Peep Hole, Milan.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/dscn7647\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"113\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/DSCN7647-360x480.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-8269\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-8269'>\n\t\t\t\tAdriano Costa, International Division of Labour &#8211; 2, 2014. Installation view at Peep Hole, Milan.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/dscn7639\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"113\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/DSCN7639-480x360.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-8271\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-8271'>\n\t\t\t\tAdriano Costa, How to be invisible in high heels, 2014.  Installation view at Peep Hole, Milan.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/hq18-ac10788s-lotus\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"132\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/HQ18-AC10788S-Lotus-422x480.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-8272\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-8272'>\n\t\t\t\tAdriano Costa, Lotus, 2014. Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/hq18-ac10762s-bartira_suggestion-for-furniture\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"112\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/HQ18-AC10762S-Bartira_Suggestion-for-Furniture-359x480.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-8273\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-8273'>\n\t\t\t\tAdriano Costa, Bartira Suggestion for Furniture, 2014. Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/hq18-ac10798s-international-herpes-society\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"112\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/HQ18-AC10798S-International-Herpes-Society-480x359.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-8274\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-8274'>\n\t\t\t\tAdriano Costa, International Herpes Society, 2014. Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2014\/09\/29\/adriano-costa-in-london-with-white-socks-at-the-peep-hole-with-brazilian-wax-fake-gucci-and-transexuals\/hq18-ac10767s-vase\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"111\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/HQ18-AC10767S-Vase-355x480.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-8275\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-8275'>\n\t\t\t\tAdriano Costa, Vase, 2014. Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl>\n\t\t\t<br style='clear: both' \/>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"JUSTIFY\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;\">First major solo exhibition by Adriano Costa in London \u2013 \u201cTouch me I am geometrically sensitive\u201d, at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sadiecoles.com\/artists\/costa#ac-touch-me-i-am-geometrically-sensitive-2014\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sadie Coles HQ<\/a> \u2013 closed last Wednesday, but a second solo show by the 39-year-old Brazilian artist from S\u00e3o Paulo opened two days after at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.peep-hole.org\/ph\/exhibitions\/upcoming\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Peep-hole, in Milan<\/a>, under the title \u201cLa Commedia dell&#8217;arte\u201d. This rare coincidence has drawn our attention, and even if at a first glance Costa&#8217;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&#8217;s work is easily adaptable to different social environments, and therefore able to unveil certain surprising, and maybe unpleasant similarities between them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"JUSTIFY\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;\">In both episodes Adriano Costa\u2019s work is humorous, serious, poetic and \u2018left field\u2019 \u2013 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"JUSTIFY\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;\">Adriano Costa constructs his sculptures with ingredients from \u2018around about\u2019 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 \u2013 which are the typical mixed-media ingredients of the studio \u2013 at Peep Hole the materials are a consequence of a metaphoric process focused on specific \u201ccharacters\u201d (as the title suggests). In this case the characters of the Comedy are some Brazilian transsexuals living in Milan, or fake luxury items&#8217; 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"JUSTIFY\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;\">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 \u201cBrazilian wax\u201d, 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).<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"JUSTIFY\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;\">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\u2019s 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 \u2018Lotus\u2019, or, in \u2018Bartira \u2013 Suggestion for Furniture\u2019, 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&#8217;s work that strongly remind us of Campana brothers&#8217; design practice.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"JUSTIFY\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;\">Simple, commonplace speech for the writer becomes the everyday object for the sculptor \u2013 a re-arranger of the chaotic or humdrum. Adriano Costa presents the \u2018everyday\u2019 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 \u2018News for free, You better accept it\u2019 (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\u2019 \u2018Collage Poems of Drafts\u2019, 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&#8217;s promises), as the fake bags on display on the fake marble clearly prove if seen in a pretentious city like Milan.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"JUSTIFY\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;\">Like many of his contemporaries, Adriano Costa, the contemporary cutting-edge avant-garde artist, develops his practice with debts to many Modernists \u2013 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 H\u00e9lio Oiticica and the Neo Concrete artists from his native Brazil, but his developing achievements as a progressive <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/whats-on\/tate-britain\/exhibition\/altermodern\/explain-altermodern\/altermodern-video-interview\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Altermodern<\/a> 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 \u2018found objects\u2019 to celebrate life, and art, as one \u2013 where Utopia meets Dystopia.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Introducing Brazilian artist Adriano Costa and his object-based manipulation of reality, sexuality and ordinary inequalities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8269,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1793],"tags":[1822],"class_list":["post-8267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-to-be-discovered","tag-adriano-costa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}