THE PAINTINGS OF JOAN COSTA: A LENGTHY CHAIN OF MEANINGS
José Ramo

Regrettable ignorance and an inchoate amazement are the boundaries which confine the perplexed gaze that seeks to understand – to inform itself and describe – what it has been able to see. Before the summer of 1997 Joan Costa was an unknown as far as I was concerned. I must confess that some pictures of his encountered in the house of a mutual friend took me by surprise. That summer brought a revelation. Naturally I felt regret for the fifteen years of his painting that I would never come to know, other than through the few works that the painter had hidden away from demanding purchasers, but there before me was the work of the previous year, taut and powerful, an inexhaustible source of readings. And it is on this that I shall concentrate, as the tiresome matter of distance has prevented me from becoming acquainted with his more recent work. I remember how at the time, as my eye roamed from one painting to the next, pausing, returning and fixing its gaze again, those images and counter-images brought to mind a definition which melds the possible with the certain. To say that the unconscious is structured like a language is an assertion rooted in the possibility that the unconscious is capable of being read. To correct any bias in favour of the purely verbal, it may be said with equal force – or inspiration – that the unconscious is a constellation of images. Images and counter-images are present in the work of Joan Costa: chains, rings, scissors, snails, knives. But also mythical representations in which the image acquires a face – or sometimes a name, because the face is denied to us – and recounts a complex and instructive narrative: Marsyas, Narcissus, Sisyphus, Icarus, Chronos.
Defined images, which establish a limit, enforce coercion. In evoking them he is not seeking to liberate himself from them but rather attempting to re-examine them in a new light. At issue is not the ability to master the ripping action of the knife on the body of Marsyas through aesthetic representation, but the reaffirmation of the complex nature of the human being, the relationship with oneself – one’s tensions, one’s desires – and with others. In this way, as the gaze is displaced towards the warm fruit which the knife is peeling, the action of flaying is also the embodiment of the desire to eat and the desire to find pleasure in the experience of suffering. In these works by Joan Costa there is no opposition of the elements leading inexorably to the affirmation of one extreme or the other, an approach that would lead to the enclosure of the signified and simplification, but racher a lucid acceptance of opposites, of internal tension and of the dynamic potency of the paradox.
But let us return to that summer of 1997. Joan Costa told me at that time that his passion was for life, not painting.
To discuss that choice would be an impertinence. But not so to examine the consequences that flow from it. While the tension, the forcefulness and the complexity manifest in the work of Joan Costa impose a need for repeated and inexhaustible readings and re-readings, it is important to bear in mind that the subject alluded to is not life in general, but passion. So, yes, it is permissible for us to hypothesise that the many experiences that the painter has undergone – so many lives, so many hours lived – have been transformed into images, resolved into a painter’s daubs, modulated into a happy and tranquil composition (very infrequently, although it does occur, for example in Eros and Psyche) or into a stridency that disrupts the anticipated harmony. Consciousness, as we know, is born out of pain or of threats to happiness. And it is precisely the processes of consciousness which form the material with which Joan Costa works. The recurring presence in some of his pictures of particular objects – chains, rings, knives – and the opposition or complementarity of the relationship they establish with the figures are not the outcome of a conscious organisation of the elements that he is pursuing in order to produce a given effect on the viewer. If this were the case, the way the elements are arranged and the function they are allocated would be structured in such a way as to teach a lesson. However, Joan Costa’s work does not appear to have a didactic purpose of any kind whatever. The painter himself confirmed to me in the conversations that we had during that summer of 1997 that there was no conscious choice applied to the objects I have mentioned. Joan Costa’s images have emerged out of necessity and out of necessity they bring us ever closer to reality. Hence the selection of certain images does not signify the decision to opt for resigned acceptance, rather it signifies that the convulsive spasm – convulsive beauty – and the dynamic potency of an intensified carnality lie at the heart of human existence and serve, partially at least, to define it. If I am not mistaken in my reading it is reasonable to say that in Joan Costa’s work the obsessions and inquisitions that mark his own life – death, eroticism, relationships with other people, suffering, sexuality – are organised lucidly and without concession to bourgeois convention. Henceforth life and work present themselves to us as being joined in intimate union. A common passion may be said to nourish them. Today I believe that this dual option and the choice the painter was claiming to have made were a test that he wished to set me. But steering away from that obstacle, let us continue our journey and attempt to discern the nature of the horizon delineated in Joan Costa’s paintings.
Joan Costa offers us a wide variety of internal perspectives and representations in his pictures. Nevertheless, it is possible at a brief glance to distinguish two constant mediating presences, those of Robert Mapplethorpe and Man Ray.
Each sustains or stimulates a representation within which are joined art and life, the passing moment and history, pleasure and torment, utopian aspiration and the ineluctable weight of reality. With Mapplethorpe, Joan Costa hurls us into the realm of mythology – Marsyas, Sisyphus, Icarus, Chronos, Narcissus; with Man Ray he projects us into the domain of art. But neither the one nor the other are presences that impose themselves, they form part of the scene but without determining its meaning. Both are located on the outward leg of the journey – from painting or mythology towards photography – but it is Joan Costa who marks out the path and the direction of the return journey. Joan Costa is returning to the art form on which photography imposed its ascendency, but not nostalgically, as if yearning for that era when artistic form became crystallised, but with the desire to increase the number of internal perspectives, creating a more complex message for the viewer. In this way we can explain the presence of archetypes and the references to the masters, accompanied by infidelity and the sense of a strange diffuseness that violently disrupts the coherence of the classical work and likewise demolishes the ideal of the human figure – that human figure which is a central image in so many of Joan Costa’s works but is subjected to so many characteristic transformations – mutilation, dismemberment, fragmentation, elongation of the anatomical features – in an appeal to the flesh.
The disruption of formal equilibrium and serenity installs paradox as the dominant element within the pictorial space, linking up individual elements to create new and complex articulations of meaning. The choice of the still life as a model of representation and the radical transformation of that model through the incorporation of elements normally alien to it is another tour de force to which the painter subjects us. The choice of objects and figures presents a vision of the world immersing itself in the complexity and density of the messages in order to impose on the spectator those continuous and inexhaustible readings to which I referred at the beginning. Carpe diem – one of the most intense pictures I have encountered in recent years – embodies and displays most of the features I have observed in Joan Costa’s work. The roundness of the forms, the pain of the ropes broken and strained by passion and the withered flowers that appear to repose by chance on the flesh all come together to speak to us of an encounter with a state of lucid melancholy, of a life lived and still experienced with pleasure. The symbols of death, pleasure and life are brought together in a final symbol. Enjoyment and suffering are yearned for and respond like a voluptuously wounded Saint Teresa anticipating the joyous shaft. However, shaft and pain find meaning in a glorious apotheosis. Transfixion is transcendency.
Joan Costa, on the other hand, places himself on a human horizon. The myths invoked are detached from any religious significance, immersing themselves in the stimulus that engendered them and combining with other images and other models to form that complex constellation offered to us in the individual pictures and the complete corpus of Joan Costa’s recent work.

Lyon, May 1999

(*) José Ramo is a poet. He works as a teacher of literature in the Cité Scolaire Internationale de Lyon (France). He writes essays about art and poetry.