Revisited Masters

Visual pollution and provocation were two weapons widely used by the surrealists to ignite estrangements, emotions, hallucinations. The process of making two temporally and visually irreconcilable situations coexist in the same work has also found success in some current advertising that has a strong impact and therefore an immediate capture precisely due to the quality of the images.
Piero Costa moves with his painting along the ridge of a symbolism that draws nourishment from the two positions just described. In the meantime, it must be said that Costa uses the pictorial technique where he could have made the photographic collage work and this choice denotes a skill as an interpreter, if not a copyist, who does not aim directly at the complaint but wishes to exercise his approach to transgressive seduction. Through the sign and perhaps the thought of Raffaello, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Tiziano, Giorgione, in short, the greatest masters of the past. At this point pollution creeps in or explodes, the irreverent declaration: "Lo sposalizio della Veregine" by Raffaello has as its focal point a very modern laser printer, while the angel of the "Annunciation" by Beato Angelico addresses his divine message to a TV off. The result appears suggestive from an essentially pictorial point of view and devastating from a cultural point of view, where each location awaits its own logic, which here is not the logic of the dream or the imaginary pursued by the surrealists, but that of the revolt pursued by Duchamp and from the "dada", with the difference that Costa acts by substitutions, not by art attributions. Which may appear even more terrifying to purists.
On other occasions Piero Costa pursues the suggestion of "addition": the gold-rimmed glasses supplied to Rembrandt's "The Man with the Golden Helmet" or an automobile detail capable of attracting the attention of the ladies of the "History of the true cross" by Piero della Francesca. This slip of intention is a prelude to the more decidedly surreal attempt which is reflected in the effects of transformation (with relative supplementary citation) operated on the protagonists of famous masterpieces: Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" perforated with windows refers to the Venus of the drawers of Dali ' , while the packed heads or the bandaged "Maya" or the faceless faces allude to Magritte. "L'ora dell'erudizione", or the face transformed into a clock face, knows of De Chirico and Ernst.
Piero Costa's technique emerges from the accumulation of references, which are added and overridden in the creative phase, capable of resurrecting the ideas of others in a more current and "bad" context, well beyond the persuasive and traitorous impact of Opera.