Giacomo Costa

GIACOMO COSTA Florence, 1970

Giacomo Costa's outlook on the future begins with an idea of overcrowded desolate architectures. His work is a denouncement of a deteriorating and uncontrollable world, yet it is not a surrender to catastrophism but rather a signal of light and awakening. At the same time, his photographs have something mysterious, prophetic, and even epic. Giacomo Costa constructs images and utopias. His idea is certainly not reassuring, but it hides a fascination for an extremely artificial and complex world, where the concepts of good and evil cancel each other out. Empty and full, human and non-human. In "Postnatural," Costa presents a completely new series of works: the Arenas, human vestiges emerging in the intense green of vegetation, something that has to do with an exploration towards the near future. A stadium, an arena, a timeless and silent Colosseum rises within the forest, in the ambiguity of survival or in the extreme defense of human construction against the vegetal siege. Alongside the Arenas, a selection of works created between 2008 and 2009 is exhibited, allowing for a full understanding of the unmistakable poetics of his visions: immobile views of absolute formal perfection that perfectly mimic photography but are actually entirely drawn in 3D. To create his trompe l'oeil of the impending disaster, Costa relies on software used in the world of cinema and special effects. "My 3D paintings require at least a month of work. The process of virtual construction is very complex and unfolds in two stages: first, I design and draw an entire city, and then I photograph it, reasoning in relation to that newly invented world just as I would if I were photographing a real city."

Curated by Valerio Dehò.