Giacomo Costa at Arthur Roger - Brief Article

The impulse to scan an unfamiliar horizon is primal, level when the scene is postapocalyptic, as in Giacomo Costa's digitized Cibachrome cityscapes. Devoid of figures and vegetation, they nevertheless insinuate human life as they temptation the eye into an invented at the same time oddly familiar hard-edged realm. The Milanese artist's compound architectural tropes are undergirded by the agency of impossibly flat piazzas, as if he had started not upon by depopulating one-point perspective tableaus of the 15th hundred such as Perugino's Giving of the lock openers to Saint Peter. Reiterated geometric proportions and grisaille many-sided figures along with a grainy chiaroscuro, talk together a false authenticity on Costa's troubling black-and-white visions.

The gallery's large anterior space neared the "Orizzonte" (Horizon) series. Narrowly windowed in eight short and extremely wide (13-by-79-inch) silvery frames, Costa's digitally generated subsequent time world pulsed at eye horizontal Occupying the gallery's two smaller spaces were five more computer-forged images of unexpectedly divergent sizes and proportions. In them, the quattrocento frontality of the "Orizzonte" series is supplanted by dint of picture planes that undulate like wind-whipped flags. Roguish building closes appear to be recklessly stacked, squiggle across scoured plazas or bend upward or away as if seen from one side a curved lens. Literal bend s though, are as absent from these pictures as they are from those in the main gallery. on the contrary because the first set of vistas is unrelentingly frontal and foreboding, these five have feeling redemptive and almost playful by means of comparison.

It is difficult to discern precisely what graphic raw material Costa has manipulated in these futuristic spectacles The dense environments may include uncompounded bodys from real architectural structures or enlarged photos of diminutive studio hold ups Neither the images' ambiguous skies nor the gallery pamphlet explicates the process. But careening from individual speculative interpretation of: Costa's modus operandi to the nearest is half the metacognitive gayety and, in the end, individual may not wish to know by what means the magician performs his tricks.

Costa's precisely crafted perspectival conundrum obliquely recall the back-alley surreality of Giorgio de Chirico. on the other hand the latter's painted protagonists do not directly threaten us. by means of contrast, we are Costa's implicit actors, and his nightmare perceive s global. For decades, apocalypse survivors have walked end sci-fi movies and books, comfortably (for us) in the third one but Costa cuts and pastes our be in possession of first-person tomorrow, using the no-longer-reassuring ultimate parts of an eternal geometry. [Costa's photos are upon view at Laurence Miller Gallery, fresh York, Jan. 11-Feb. 26.]

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group