Gustavo Costa Fernandes: For Health and Happiness
On view: July 1 -August 30, 2022 Asher Grey Gallery on Artsy
Gustavo Costa Fernandes' practice focuses primarily on painting and mono-printing. He often uses figurative subjects to identify, recast, and rebuild scenes with more ambiguous codes, taking banal situations to symbolic conditions and a universal code of vivid marks. Found photography, digital trash, and simple memories form most of the starting points of his work – the banal, the corny, the fringed, the scared, and the total opposite, made of contradiction and paradox, with the elements going from the underground to the mainstream and back.
He often implements processes that use an instinctive make-up that is emotional, economic and devoid of most time references. His yearning is for the works to materialize like small exorcisms, anxious and restless. Disquiet is his most important tool. When there is no agitation to be employed, the work is dead and decorative at birth, and he restarts the undertaking. As a result, many of the paintings have two, three or even more other paintings buried underneath - with the previous vestiges working as a fertile ground for accidents and new, unexpected routes of communication. When this isn't the case, it's because the artwork was created in one sitting, with one specific and direct temperament. Both ways seek the same outcome, scenes that are at the same time ubiquitous and largely unlearned.
Gustavo Costa Fernandes was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1983 and currently lives and works in London.
Artist website: https://gustavocostafernandes.com
Contact us for more information or to view work in person.
Exhibit online at https://www.artsy.net/asher-grey-gallery
Asher Grey Gallery
[email protected]
310 562 0511
Gustavo Costa Fernandes' practice focuses primarily on painting and mono-printing. He often uses figurative subjects to identify, recast, and rebuild scenes with more ambiguous codes, taking banal situations to symbolic conditions and a universal code of vivid marks. Found photography, digital trash, and simple memories form most of the starting points of his work – the banal, the corny, the fringed, the scared, and the total opposite, made of contradiction and paradox, with the elements going from the underground to the mainstream and back.
He often implements processes that use an instinctive make-up that is emotional, economic and devoid of most time references. His yearning is for the works to materialize like small exorcisms, anxious and restless. Disquiet is his most important tool. When there is no agitation to be employed, the work is dead and decorative at birth, and he restarts the undertaking. As a result, many of the paintings have two, three or even more other paintings buried underneath - with the previous vestiges working as a fertile ground for accidents and new, unexpected routes of communication. When this isn't the case, it's because the artwork was created in one sitting, with one specific and direct temperament. Both ways seek the same outcome, scenes that are at the same time ubiquitous and largely unlearned.
Gustavo Costa Fernandes was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1983 and currently lives and works in London.
Artist website: https://gustavocostafernandes.com
Contact us for more information or to view work in person.
Exhibit online at https://www.artsy.net/asher-grey-gallery
Asher Grey Gallery
[email protected]
310 562 0511