26 Nov 2015

Luis Paulo Costa at the Leal Rios Foundation

' Art used to be made for illusion; now it is made from illusions.^₁

The exhibition of the work of Luis Paulo Costa at the Leal Rios Foundation entitled Part One: One Another takes the form of an artistic essay, it 'is a momentary staging of objects that are constantly in motion as they make their journey between the studio, museum, gallery, collection, reproduction and onwards. Each encounter and each contact adds experience, pulling the artwork out of the past into a series of presents. An exhibition can either report or experiment. A report seeks to show what is held to be true; an experiment does not ask for an acceptance that what is being proposed is either true or right, rather it requests an acceptance of only what is necessary in order to ask 'what if'?^₂. This proposition is extended in Costa's second exhibition entitled Part Two: One and Other. The works in each of the rooms have been carefully selected by the artist to resonate with one another, whilst the separation of the pieces into two separate showings reveals aspects of the artist's curatorial stance.

Costa's work employs painting, sculpture, photography, video, digital imagery and installation; however, his is an art of the reluctant conjuror: obscuring and revealing in turns. Through strategies of overpainting, erasure, quotation and punning he covers the traces of the artistic process just enough to stimulate the viewer's curiosity to uncover the methodology of its lineage. '


- In 'Part One: One Another', Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley

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1 Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, Berkeley, p.109.
2 Lisa LeFeuvre, Tooth House, in Ian Kiaer:Tooth House, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2014, p.41.