Wagner Costa

Visual artist and architect, Wagner has been dedicating himself to artistic research since 1998. He has participated in important training courses in Visual Arts in Brazil and abroad such as Drawing - ARTAC (The Florence Classical Arts Academy) - Florence (2019). Drawing - Barcelona Academy of Art - Barcelona (2018) Engraving Workshop - Iberê Camargo Foundation under the coordination of Eduardo Haesbaert (2019). Orientation to artistic research with Ms Niura Borges (2018-2020). Among her exhibitions are the International Circuit of Brazilian Art - Brazilian Embassies London, Vienna, Madrid and Lisbon (2003). First Prize of the Popular Jury at the 9th Salon of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture of the Cultural Foundation of Canoas/RS (2002). "Whether due to the drama evoked or the technique employed, Pliny's legend is a fertile metaphor for entering Wagner Costa's production: between paintings and engravings, videos and installations, the artist uses exercises in self-representation to achieve visual expressions of fragmentation and destruction. The exhibition Da pele ao pó - the artist's first solo show at Mamute Gallery - began to be conceived in 2019 during a season of studies at the Academy of Classical Art in Florence (Italy) and intensified over the last two years at the Iberê Camargo Foundation's Atelier de Gravura, where Wagner conceived works in the press that belonged to the master from Rio Grande do Sul. Between the shapeless and the shapeless, the four large paintings present in the exhibition result from the direct relationship of the artist's body with the white surface: Wagner performs in front of the paper and registers his superimposed movements with charcoal and pastel. Each position captured is an index of his presence in that past, the memory of the gesture is sedimented and the accumulation of layers always refers back to the first staging - solitary, ritualistic. In this series of works, the movement is not only suggestion, insinuation or representation: the choreography transmutes itself into painting, and the result is an almost abstract sum of invoices". Henrique Menezes. Specialist in Curatorial Studies and Contemporary Art at the University of Lisbon.

Por: Galeria de Arte Mamute