Earth Shows Herself

When we view a body of work in an exhibition, we should experience what the poet Keats called “wonder”: a particular, life-enhancing moment. I think we hope, when looking at a painting, to get away from the ordinary. The viewer may feel as if he or she has already been there, or that something they have seen, or experienced before, is suddenly presented in an extraordinary fashion, which both reinforces an experience and lifts it to another level of perception.

The accompanying document cum exhibition is a storyboard evoking the mysteries and nature of things that are. This story is a distillation of several years spent in researching landscapes in a context of air and water. I learned through visiting and working in different countries, physically experiencing the land, then translating my observations into paintings through preliminary drawings and the camera lens.

The vast storehouse of events and actualities that are invested in the sky, water and earth worlds, the way they shaped and reshaped themselves into a composite whole - baffling but astonishing in its wealth of presences – never ceased to fascinate me. Every experience in a new place called for a sort of intellectual and emotional displacement, resulting in my complete absorption in the present moment, whether of geographical location, climate, or personal sensations.

We pass through few real doors in our lives.

The landscape is a library in itself. Taking lessons from this, I have been able, over the years, to broadly grasp its solid presences and shifting changes. In my work, even in the smallest canvases, I have tried to evoke distances, _______________ a sense of other worlds.

Earth shows herself completely only to those who feel this sense of wonder in her presence. I believe that only a few can enter her and explore the heart of her myriad compositions. Drinking in her spring water, walking the bodies of hollows in the guiding light of day and being calmed by night voices, one feels in all earth’s multi-formations, a sense of being nurtured.

An important aspect in these collections of my work is seeing beauty as it unfolds in its own time and spaces. The use of cloud forms and the horizon line are signature elements in my work, serving to enhance the feeling of vastness, to give the viewer the sensation of the remoteness and purity of landscapes.

This constructed reality – whether up close, confrontational, dreamy or stark nevertheless already exists in our sensibilities. My work as an artist is to open a door to earth viewing, to draw forth an essential manner of seeing, an imparting of small secrets that emerge as embraces and recognitions of paths to the precious things inherent in nature and in ourselves.

Antonio E Costa