ART CITIES:L.A.-Adriano Costa

Like many other countries, in the eyes of a foreigner Brazil might seem to be a destination of nonstop sunshine, sex, and samba, but it’s the gap between the rich and the poor that shows up in Adriano Costa’s work. He says “People think Brazilians are happy all the time, but there’s a lot of sadness here”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery Archive

Adriano Costa’s first solo exhibition in the U.S.A. has the title ”DearMeatCutsDevilMayCry” and is on presentation at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Adriano Costa’s practice often involves working on site in every city his next exhibition will take place, and he combines materials foraged from the urban landscape of his native São Paolo with those he finds in his temporary adopted homes. The exhibition features works made using a wide range of processes, and includes paintings, works on paper, and a diversity of sculptures, though it is impossible to relegate any given piece to a single one of these categories. Costa’s approach to installation reinforces this notion. Works that might ordinarily be placed on the floor are suspended from the wall and vice versa, and almost all are replete with imagery and text that speak to the current moment of their creation, communicating today’s most urgent realities.  Despite the pressing contemporaneity that characterizes his work, Costa is also an astute descendant of the rich art historical traditions particular to Brazilian modernism. These include Neo-Concretism and Antropofagia (A group of Modernism in Brazil, which, although short-lived, proved influential in its emphasis on folklore and native themes). By applying an industrial, glittering gold finish to a group of found objects, including a bass drum, a walker, and a vacuum cleaner all acquired at a thrift store in L.A., Costa has created an unlikely family of stand-ins for the contemporary human subject. Bathed in visual symbolism indicative of the promise of easy wealth, and yet divorced from the purposes of their own labor, the objects hang together by the slightest of conceptual threads, united by surface alone as their usefulness disintegrates. With the exhibition opening less than two weeks before the already fraught spectacle of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, works like these channel the corruption and despair, the crumbling nostalgia, and the specters of disease, that are, despite their ominous undertones and overtones, inexhaustible sources of life as we know it now.

Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W Edgewood Pl, Los Angeles, Duration: 23/7-27/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://davidkordanskygallery.com