Adriano Costa — Galerie Mendes Wood DM, Paris
Radical, free, and imbued with a vibrant fragility, the work of Brazilian artist Adriano Costa (b. 1975) unfolds in all its complexity across the living walls of Mendes Wood DM Gallery. What emerges is an art whose directness is never gratuitous—one that doesn’t simply mock the codes of good taste or invert its values, but instead probes the very foundations of the artistic act itself.
For Adriano Costa, creation does not aim toward the finished object, but rather toward the suspended moment in which making occurs—that point where intention encounters the random, where art takes root in the very fabric of existence, with its debris, its fragments, its unexpected beauty. Because everything, he suggests, is animal; everything lives. And perhaps it is precisely here that the quiet yet unyielding power of the Sweet presentation lies: to endow matter—however humble—with the capacity to sustain our gaze.
Humble materials, found objects, worn textiles, disjointed structures—everything at first seems to obey a logic of strip- ping-down. But behind this apparent minimalism, a true compositional intelligence emerges. Spatial, first: the works shape a path in which each curve, each tension, each void contributes to a sensitive cartography of space, with a magnetic anchor point revealed in a monumental mobile, at once fragile and commanding. Rhythmic, too: the eye is guided by a cadence of intensities, an alternation of visual densities and releases, thick textures and tenuous lines. The exhibition unfolds through bursts and interruptions, hidden zones and skewed sightlines that disrupt the expected circularity of gal- lery movement. And yet circularity remains—through rebound and echo, within the artworks themselves.
It is perhaps within this dissonant yet coherent structure that one of the deepest forces of Costa’s work resides. By slo- wing our perception and compelling us to relinquish the automatisms of contemplation, the artist restores a long, open- ended temporality—a way of apprehending the world by letting oneself be traversed by it. Like a concrete poet, Costa gathers the most subtle signs of the everyday to generate a visual language whose economy of means never implies emptiness, but instead, intensity.
Scattered in strokes, the joyful trace of the artist’s invisible brush outlines species of space in place of motifs—breaths (or sighs) of material standing in for figuration. In the immanence of the trivial, in the dust of objects, in the apprehen- sion of the discarded, the works enact a near-ritual transformation of the viewer. For this is truly an experience to be lived: that of a de-hierarchized world, an aesthetics of otherness, where every fragment becomes an open riddle, and each association invites a shift in perception.
A poetic disarmament echoes through Costa’s process, seemingly fed by slowness, only to erupt in flashes—improvised associations whose execution, low in technique and energy, reflects the passage of time in the realm of the discarded.
Until the artist’s decision reclaims the object, charging it with his own vision and revealing, in its persistence and juxta- position with its kin, a furious magic of art: its power to make things into mirrors, capable of reflecting our gaze back at us, stripped of judgment, simply curious to discover the next encounter—and thus, already transformed, for the better; in the welcome of otherness.
Adriano Costa, Sweet — Mendes Wood DM Gallery, Paris, 25 place des Vosges, 75004 Paris — June 28, August 9, 2025
