APPEARANCE, REALITY AND VISUAL “SPIN” IN THE PAINTINGS OF JOAN COSTA

Domingo Barreres *

The painter’s mastery of brushwork and sensitivity to light and colour are immediately evident in the works of Joan Costa. A clarity of form and a harmony of composition seem to imbue these works with a mellowness while the traditional format of the still life invites the spectator to engage in a very intimate form of contemplation.

What we have here is «bella pintura» or «fine art», but it is art that makes use of everyday objects (flowers, sea shells, books, etc.) to convince us, or remind us, of the continuing esteem in which the classicist notion of beauty is held, even today.

There should be nothing strange, new or surprising about any of this, nor of course, should there be anything relevant in it to the problems, concerns, hopes and interests that preoccupy us today.
However, Joan Costa makes use of these objects, adopting a compositional approach that does not seek to break with the familiar formal canons, and a soundly-grasped and well-practised technique, to bring out a tension that is present at the level of our psychological make-up. This tension, which reveals itself to us gradually, takes us from apparent comfort to confrontation, forcing us into an unfamiliar stance without ever crossing over into the realm of the surreal.
Flowers (always cut flowers), snails (exoskeletons that once harboured life), books (open books, displaying black and white homoerotic images photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe) – together these contingencies not only supply us with poetic metaphors – precious residues of presences in the process of disappearance, or that have already disappeared, with death or with distance – but succeed in intriguing us with new morphologies which testify to the awakening of that politico-sexual consciousness that our age demands.
The male body appears, nude and eroticised in Mapplethorpe’s controversial photographs, in order to celebrate and universalise what has previously been taboo.
Historically the naked body of a woman, even when eroticised, has been regarded as something normal and acceptable.
Since all painters (with very few exceptions) have been male, there is no reason for us to be surprised by this. Joan Costa also uses the female nude, but gives it an important spin.
In his female nudes Joan Costa again uses familiar photographs, this time those of Man Ray, but the spin that is applied to the visual play alters the frame of reference: reification of the woman and her unconsciously collaborative attitude help to maintain the existence of structures that enslave her.
The celebration of sexuality and the attempt to universalise and normalise it are complemented by a subtle inference of the risks associated with it and by the evidence that part of this hazardous game is an adventurous encounter with death, an inescapable fact in these closing decades of the millennium.
The work of Joan Costa is capable of being read on these different levels because it is the product of his personal inspiration, informed by history and mythology, and of his own experience of life.

Boston, 1999
(*) Domingo Barreres is a painter and tea her of art in the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA.