JOAN COSTA: THE FIGURATIVE REINTERPRETED

POETICS OF THE “D’APRÈS”.

Trahit sua quemque voluptas.
Virgil, Bucolics 2,65.

It has always been my belief that the attempt at a retrospective review undertaken with the help of personal memory on the occasion of an exhibition of an artist’s work is ultimately the ideal opportunity for studying, analysing, contextualising and interpreting their output as a whole. It also requires a comprehensive appraisal of the artist’s stylistic evolution, an evaluation of the influences they reference and the way those influences relate to another, and most importantly, a systematic examination of the key aspects of the artist’s “poetics”. (By “poetics” I mean the abstract concept that embodies (a) the artist’s personal philosophy of art, (b) their practical engagement with a relevant programme of artistic activity, and (c) their success in carrying out that programme as reflected in the structured development of a personal artistic idiom.)

In theory at least, the task will involve bringing together all the various interacting components – historical, theoretical, technical, ethical and aesthetic aspects – to form an ultimately coherent whole through a process of honest and reasoned aesthetic analysis, which is the fundamental task of an art critic.
So, faced with such a demanding professional challenge and presented with the unique opportunity offered by present circumstances and an invitation from the artist himself to become involved, I have decided to make the most of the opportunity offered by the exhibition of Joan Costa’s paintings being organised this spring (2019) by the Municipality of Gandía at the Coll Alas Centre as part of its programme of events celebrating the town’s designation by the Regional Autonomous Government as Valencian Capital of Culture.
I believe that it is possible to take cultural advantage of this opportunity to undertake an up-to-date assessment and analysis of Costa’s artistic output with my own contribution taking the form of an essay that I have been asked to write for inclusion in the exhibition catalogue.
Joan Costa was born in Gandía in 1952. From his earliest days it was apparent from his special interest in the study of the visual arts that he knew he was destined to become a painter, and he chose his study options accordingly. A succession of primary and secondary school-teachers recognised his skills and talent for drawing and painting and eventually, by the nineteen-seventies, the restless young Joan Costa found himself enrolling at the San Carlos College of the Fine Arts [Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia] in Valencia.

That era of the last throes of Francoism was no easy time for anyone and that was certainly the case as far as students at the historic Centro del Carmen were concerned. Ideological tensions were often linked to and influenced by the prevailing artistic fashions of the day and sometimes even actively associated with contemporary political demands.
However the young Joan Costa had a clear idea from the very beginning what it was he wanted to achieve from his academic education and how to make the most effective strategic use of the curriculum offered at the Centre. Course after course, he dedicated himself without hesitation to the task of completing the programme of study units he had signed up for. Early on he decided to allow himself to be guided by the advice and tutorial support of Francisco Lozano, one of his teachers who effectively became his mentor, offering Costa his opinions on Costa’s work, personal concerns, experiences and the choices available to him during his undergraduate course and two subsequent years of postgraduate study (1977-79), funded by a competitive bursary awarded by the Valencia Provincial Council [Diputació de València].
The nineteen-seventies was, as we know, a decade of turbulence and social and political tension in Valencia and the same was true inside San Carlos College. It is important to recall what a remarkable period that was. Franco’s death signalled the end of the Francoist era and the start of the long and complicated process of transition to democracy. At the same time, towards the end of the decade the historic College of the Fine Arts was embarking on its own process of transformation, obtaining its university charter and becoming the new University Faculty of the Fine Arts. This change of status, long discussed and planned in advance, took effect with the publication of the relevant Ministerial Decree in 1978 and the Faculty’s incorporation into the Polytechnic University of Valencia [Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)].
Looking back again now, I can say in all sincerity that I have always believed that UPV made the wrong decision in choosing to leave the Convento del Carmen at that particular time. Without resistance, it gave up a set of facilities I am certain would have crucially, or at least significantly, assisted the College’s social and cultural assimilation as a part of the University based in and looking outwards from the city centre of Valencia. When a number of years later they belatedly changed their minds (I was a witness to what I am describing here), by then it was too late and the building had been reassigned to other uses.
Joan Costa’s year group at the College of the Fine Arts (1971-1976), in fact arrived ahead of the many changes that were about to transform the academic environment. Aware of the situation, Costa decided, after careful thought, to take full advantage of the educational opportunity offered by a diverse group of teachers, the majority, not surprisingly, entrenched followers of the Valencian artistic tradition of figurative art and the neo-classical style. It is worth bearing in mind that the history of the Royal Academy of the Fine Arts [Real Academia de Bellas Artes], the College’s parent body, dates back to 14 February 1768, when both the Academy and the College were established by Royal Charter of Carlos III. As I write we are celebrating the 250th anniversay of that historic event.
The members of staff at San Carlos College of the Fine Arts at the time Joan Costa arrived there included such academically notable figures as Francisco Lozano Sanchis (1912-2000), Felipe Garín Ortiz de Taranco (1908-2005), Alfons Roig Izquierdo (1903-1987), José Esteve Edo (1917-2015), Luis Arcas Brauner (1934-1989), Francisco Baños Martos (1928-2006), José Amérigo Salazar (1915-1988), Víctor M. Gimeno Baquero (1920-2012), Manuel Silvestre de Edeta (1909-2014) and Santiago Rodríguez García (1914-2016), all of them still actively involved in teaching. The inexorable march of time meant that before long many of them would take retirement to make way for a younger generation of teachers willing to implement the new approaches and reforming objectives of the new regime which were to make their impact felt before the end of the decade.
It is important for those of us who lived through that long and eventful period of Valencia’s history to provide this kind of background information, by way of context and explanation at least, in order to give the reader of today a better understanding of what preceded and followed the changes that were to have such an effect on the local artistic landscape during those crucial decades.
So, returning to Joan Costa, at the same time as Costa was acquiring the practical skills and knowledge he needed to embark on artistic career, he was also developing a especially keen interest in the history of painting. This interest was to be particularly important during the period of his studies and in his subsequent professional career, which has also included teaching in areas closely linked to the history of art.
From the time he chose painting as his degree course specialism, Joan Costa has had a close affinity with the human figure as a subject. It was one of the principal motifs of his work while a student and he devoted every effort to mastering the genre. He has never abandoned it and it has in fact become his preferred choice of subject and the key feature of his technical and creative strategies. In fact the rich potential offered by the purely visual aspects of the genre and its capacity for allusion and symbolic reference became the two key elements of his work as an artist, along with the inspiration he clearly derived from the historical vitality of its content.
Truth to tell, Joan Costa has had little difficulty finding a source of the referential power of command over figurative reality that has always been evident in his paintings, in the surrounding human environment itself and/or in the contextualising historical universe of shared memory. In practice we artists are very much aware of the intimate relationship that exists between memory, experience and invention at the threshold of creativity.
Reality and history have served as the two looking-glasses in which Costa has located the pictorial elements and relationships that he has employed in his personal narratives, his eclectic imaginative confections and his robust yet sophisticated interpretative challenges. Because their essence is the interpretation of history and the construction of a personal reality, hinging on that forceful element of fantasy that Joan Costa has always brought to his re-interpretations, new versions, hommages and “d’après” pieces on his bold, playful attempt to develop an alternative transmodernism that is transgressive and differentiated.
Tradition and the classical gaze are also present, subjected – for reasons of expressive necessity – to uninvited interventions and adventures in confrontation involving allegorical choices, spiritual origins, symbolic gestures, erotic suggestions, mythological tableaux and historical comparisons, profusely cross-referenced to the works of certain artists, photographers in particular – Man Ray (1890-1976), Joel Peter Witkins (1968), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), Douane Michael (1932), David Hamilton (1933-2016) among others – who people his works, openly, secretly or cabalistically, according to circumstance. With a sideways wink and the occasional ironic gesture, Costa seeks to inject the history of contemporary painting into his own artistic efforts. This is one of his principal aims and concerns.

To summarise, the most characteristic features of Joan Costa’s serial works are their disturbing yet intimate nature, the transgressivity of their enigmatic narratives, and the inevitable presence of structured references and even certain doubts and difficulties that are cathartically re-examined in his personal reflections on the nature of his work as he paints. Ultimately, then, his works are suffused with history but constantly reveal their innovative nature in the visual interactions of their contrastive approach, involving the selection of specific elements from distinct sources which are brought into dramatic confrontation. I often think I sense Costa transforming himself into some imaginary creature with the capacity to leap across time and, with the help of a combination of quotations and appropriations, intervene in a utopian scenario that is disconcerting and disruptive. At other times we come across a classical composition that is, alternatively, deconstructed or fragmented, without warning, under interrogation by his uncompromising gaze. And then too, there are the creative force fields that are liable in Costa’s contemporary works to emerge directly from technical hesitations, the resolution of a problem or the escape from an impasse offered by a new objective. Joan Costa is able, in moments of genuine spontaneity, to communicate this sort of complex experience to us, drawing strength from weakness on the horizons of everyday life, audaciously transformed.
It is that spirit of inquiry and daring that Joan Costa is always bringing to his work as a painter. There are some particularly relevant examples among his serial and individual works: “Sacra neteja” [Holly cleaning] I / II / III and IV” (2007), “Veròniques [Veronicas] I / II” (2003), “Volaverunt” (2003), “Eros i Psique” (2002), “Carpe diem” (1998) and “La via láctea” “The Milky Way”.
As we observed earlier, the human figure, individually or collectively, remains the central protagonist around whom the drama unfolds, the essential visual element with the capacity to stop us in our tracks and force us to leave the comfort zone of our own interpretations. And, the truth is that, as we have noted, there are a thousand different ways in which the narrative of reality and history can be constructed, interpreted and disclosed.
Joan Costa uses this to persuade us to adopt alternative historical gazes that he has brought together to serve his transgressive purpose. He re-interprets images, modifies their meanings, adapts references, incorporates carefully-chosen undertones, changes level and confounds our expectations. Even the titles of his works communicate this information, often directly and emphatically: “Le violon d’Ingres” [“Ingres’s Violin/Personal interest”] favourites!! (2002), “Kiki enfadada” “Kiki annoyed”, “A propòsit de Man Ray” “Regarding Man Ray”, “Verónica Taylor” (2017).
This is the basic principle of the “d’après” pieces we referred to earlier – the artist reconstructs a scene or image on the basis of strategies that have been imported from elsewhere, which he appropriates through the process of transgression while at the same time rendering clandestine homage to the act of remembrance by a knowing wink, a re-interpretation and the creation of a distinct, alternative piece.
Costa’s “d’après” is a rear view mirror transformed into a windscreen looking towards the future. It is a means of admiring history and at the same time plundering it, by appropriating its legacy and making it available for our own randomly-decided purpose. That is the significance of what we may term the “reiterated appropriation” that underpins the relationship between the unexpected choices made in the “d’après” piece – mixtures of techniques, disruptions of sequences, contrasts of detail, the creation of multiple associations and the recontextualisation of associations accomplished through the imposition of symbolic echoes and eloquent quotations.
It has to be said that public exhibitions in recent decades have offered no shortage of examples of this type of collaborative strategy. Limiting ourselves to the immediate context of our local artistic community, with specific reference to the working career of my subject, Gandía’s native son Joan Costa, and his creative preference for re-interpretations, appropriations and hommages, I take the liberty of citing some names of fellow artists employing the same kind of resources and methods including Jorge Ballester (Valencia, 1941-2015), Manuel Valdés (Valencia, 1942-), Rafael Armengol (Benimodo, 1940-), Joan Antoni Toledo (Valencia, 1940-1995), Rosa Torres (Valencia, 1948-) and Antoni Miró (Alcoi, 1944-), not to mention the strategies adopted by the Equipo Crónica (1967-1981) and Equipo Realidad (1966-1976) collectives based on a similar recycling of historical quotations.
Combining a wide variety of ideas and intentions, they have all sought to breathe new life into modernism/postmodernism or transmodernism in altered circumstances using an appropriate artistic approach based on the systematic pursuit of personalised originality. In their similar and distinct ways, they have engaged with the history of the image in a deliberate attempt to take possession of it, achieve a semantic renewal and draw attention to the distinctive capabilities of their own versions and re-interpretations, always featuring an ironic attitude towards the icons of the mass media or the imposition of an alternative point of view, reflecting their own relevant artistic concerns, on the activity of painting itself, now transformed into a versatile and at the same time compelling means of communication.
The various points we have touched on here serve, as I see it, to locate Joan Costa’s artistic itinerary within a complex and prolific portfolio of individual and serial works, using a carefully considered mixture of oil and acrylic techniques over decades of study, combined with artistic and teaching activities, that have made the organisation of this retrospective exhibition in Costa’s birthplace of Gandía possible and made these fresh thoughts on contextualision and reappraisal of the capacity of the human form to serve as a universal language possible.
That leaves us with another, no less fundamental, question to consider, which relates directly to the working context in which Joan Costa engages with the basic theme of the “d’après” and his inclination as an artist to create new versions, under different circumstances and at different times, of some previous works of his that are particularly noteworthy, evocative or significant or have been lost and that he now misses.
The “d’après” strategy may be described as a process of doubling back and revisiting the original work as the artist produces the new version. It involves re-engaging with the intentions of the original as a reference point for the d’après reformulation, and conserving its essential compositional features while subjecting some of its references and its expressive purposes to a drastic modification.
The element of chronological counterpoint is crucial here, insofar as the different versions with the same title, coexisting but perhaps held in different collections, geographically separated by chance and time, identify themselves through their differing dates – “Menina nueta” [“Young Maid”] (c. 1980, 2017 version), “Les temtacions de Sant Antoni” [“The Temptations of St Anthony]” (c. 1982, 2018 version), “Les cames de Sussy Solidor” [“Suzy Solidor’s Legs”] (c.1982, 2017 version). “Escàndol a la plaja nudista” [“Uproar on the Nudist Beach]” (c. 1985, 2018 version).
As we have indicated with the quotation from Virgil’s Bucolics (Buc. 2, 65) that introduces this essay, “Trahit sua quemque voluptas” (“Each of us is drawn to his own pleasure”), it is obvious that we are each of us driven forward in our attitudes, our behaviour and our life’s pursuits by a unique passion. Joan Costa is no exception, as we have demonstrated in the course of these reflections on the complex artistic journey he has travelled.
The poetics of the “d’après”, in its different versions and strategies, have in fact defined and characterised his particular artistic idiom, in constant use in his experimental investigation of form and narrative and with its primary focus – in its academic origins and as the result of conscious choice – on the anatomical, symbolical and representational potential of the human figure as a thematic resource throughout the history of the image. And it is in that tradition that Joan Costa has found the true path of his vocation and at the same time expressed his enduring passion for the dialogues he is capable of establishing between the remembered past, the shared present and the always essentially enigmatic future.
Summer 2018.
Romà de la Calle
Universitat de València