Artist: Adriano Costa
Exhibition title: CEMITÉRIO
Curated by: Samuel Leuenberger and Benedikt Wyss
Venue: SALTS, Birsfelden, Switzerland
Date: June 16 – September 30, 2022
Photography: Gunnar Meier Photography / Courtesy: SALTS & the Artist
“Art is another deeper stuff, but we dance the song. Hallelujah.”
Brazilian artist Adriano Costa deals intensely with reality, using its tragic state. The artist prefers to use the term fatality in this context. In his exhibition at City SALTS Costa talks about borders and paradoxes such as beauty and ugliness, or the reason for creating art and the visibly decrypted system he is obsessed with.
Costa’s bronze forms are cast from casts of old sculptures by the artist, giving the exhibition its name: Cemitério, Cemetery. Costa works with the dead part of the artwork, the dead side, or what in theory has to be the dead side. The golden color is dirty and unpolished, too, reminiscent of the old, the realm of death.
The artist thinks his cemetery as sacred and profane at the same time, messing with what is desirable with the stillborn aura of the installation. It shows his attempt to discuss aesthetics by setting himself apart from all what is calculated. The sculptures are the result of antagonistic forces, relating the inside and the outside. What is cast is discarded, and the waste is exhibited.
According to Adriano Costa, the key to Cemitério is offered by the Chinese Tao Te Ching, which ultimately aims at lasting harmonious coexistence, and thus nothing less than world peace. The classical text attempts to illustrate how antagonistic forces must work together for a thing to exist:
When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created.
When people see things as good, evil is created.
Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.
Therefore the Master can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word.
Things come her way and she does not stop them;
things leave and she lets them go.
She has without possessing, and acts without any expectations.
When her work is done, she takes no credit.
That is why it will last forever.
Tao Te Ching, chapter 2
English version chosen by the artist
In addition to other works and various smaller and larger interventions in the exhibition architecture, the artist collages scenes from the video clip “Piece of Me” by Britney Spears (2007) with pieces from the film scores of Ben Hur (1959) and Caligula (1979). Repeatedly, as an hynotic and pathologic mantra. The pop star is turned into a symbol of fate. In this, the artist thinks about himself as an ingredient, out of his control, “floating in a brew when things like money, success, illusion, floppiness and death are the plat du jour.»
He elevates the once golden girl Britney Spears to a product of a heroic destiny and places this fallen angel in the mythical place he believes she has reached. Spears – star, object, but above all soul – belongs to the same world as his sculptures of false gold. This world is a phantasmagoria, an illusion in front of an audience: tragic, romantic, poetic, and fatal.
Adriano Costa follows Britney Spears on Instagram, and always he has the feeling that she knows him personally. After all, the cemetery he created is his own: «I love it! It’s my life! It’s Art Basel. We know art is another, deeper stuff. But we dance the song. Hallelujah.”
-Benedikt Wyss
