COSTAS PICADAS
Email: cpicadas@gmail.com
Tel : 3475893845
Forms of Life
Is it a romantic notion to assume that art has healing powers, that it could make the world a better place, or the individual a healthier person? These questions come up as I look at the work of Costas Picadas. The artist grew up in a family of doctors in Greece, but he decided to take a different path, attending art school in Paris before moving to his current home base of New York. Picadas mixes an interest in medical science with a personal, experiential study of nature. These elements blend together in his artworks, including in the recent Biomes series, which presents projections of slow-moving images, as well as prints and drawings, all showing natural and abstract motifs.
The projections feel at times like looking through a microscope into the body of a human being or the tissue of a plant. A world of patterns, of tubes and circular forms, appears. All are connected in an ingenuous structure, and in a slow, ongoing movement. Then, mixed with such close ups, a landscape image may emerge, a view we recall from spending time outside: the leaves of a tree shimmering in the sunlight, or a flower opening and closing again. It appears as a stretch of time condensed into ten or twenty seconds. Bringing all of these different perspectives together into one work, with images blending into each other, the artist gives insights into the complex architecture of the world as it surrounds us but is also inside of us. We zoom in on what we cannot see with our bare eyes, and in the work, this is connected to the world as we know it from looking outside.
“I overlay the natural imagery I take from forests with cell imagery from labs, as a way of drawing comparisons between those life forms,” the artist noted. He is fascinated by nature’s potential for regeneration. This also applies to the human body, in the way that cells renew themselves. “I think art can aid the process of regrowth and repair by reminding us of innate natural abilities,” he added. Relating this to the question of the healing power of art, the artist offers a visual reflection on the subject, as if he has written an essay about it in images, not in words. The works are not just aimed at understanding structures, but also at showing connections in and with nature. The real source for healing is located in nature, the work seems to suggest, and yet through artworks, this source can be reflected and brought to the surface. It is significant that in Picadas’s approach, we look not just at humans, but at diverse forms of life. We are simply one among many others.
The artist’s oeuvre comprises different formats and media. While in earlier years his focus was on photography, in recent years the moving-image installations have grown in importance. They might be seen in a gallery on a monitor, or as big projections on the side of a building, or even as a surround installation that covers all of the walls of a space, creating an insular environment. His work aims for an immersive experience in which the goal is not just to analyze an image as an interpretation of the world, but to become part of it, to synchronize with the rhythms as they appear in the works. These pieces are inspired by natural life, by breathing in and out, by the cycle of light during the day, and the change of seasons during the year. Change as it comes to us in these works is change as observed in nature, and as happens all the time both in- and outside of ourselves.
- Jurriaan Benschop
From my perspective, I understand this exhibition as one that focuses primarily on the scientific method of investigation from an artistic point of view. One might say it is a complex exhibition for that reason, but not necessarily so.
In recent years, we have seen a growing interest in exhibitions that seek to bring art and science together. Often in such exhibitions, the emphasis goes more toward the scientific than the artistic, which is contingent on the kind of language necessary to describe the work(s) of the art. I see the direction of this language as moving towards a kind of specificity and accuracy in a manner less frequently apparent in more traditional artistic media, such as painting, sculpture, and printmaking.
It would appear that Costas Picadas is less interested in traditional media even as his paintings and videos are possibly more advanced in terms of how they are produced and, more significantly, how they deliver the terms the artist aspires to bring to fruition – that being the betrothal between science and nature, often as a personal experience.
Given that Costas was born in Greece to a father who was a medical doctor, his interest in research has played a distinct role in making this betrothal happen. Much of the artist’s work is related to what he views in a microscope suggesting the presence of what are called biomes. These are defined as ecological organisms that eventually adapt to one another as a group along with homologies or resemblances that are due to inheritances found in a common ancestry (defined by the research scientist, G.G. Simpson).
In the work of Costas, the overall message behind or within his work is focused less on formal concerns than on the specific role of content, namely the aesthetic connection between science and nature. The point is to bring them closer together in a way that allows the discourse and the sensibility to connect discreetly with one another.
The recent exhibition on view at the Tenri Cultural Institutefocuses primarily on the artist’s paintings and drawings in addition to the artist’s videos. In addition, I will mention a series of photographic works that involve portraits that suggest interior human organs. They are identified as singular works, wherein each photograph designates an organ. They are BRAIN, HEART, KNEE,LUNGS, and SPINE. Each of these is surrounded by reeds and wild flowers as if growing from the organ outwards. This is what some viewers might consider a Surrealist manifestation derived from an innate human body.
There are other paintings in a square format, which might be considered drawings, with painted turquoise sections within a field of abstract lines and shapes. These might also reference the body’s interior as seen by rectilinear canvases covered with expressionist-style circles in varied colors referring to activities both within and outsidethe body. These paintings are the most satisfying works in the show. In each of Costas’ paintings and drawings, there are abstract referents suggesting microscopic information gleaned from a scientific excursion whereby the artist has sought out biomes and homologies through what one writer refers to as the “complex architecture of the world.”
It would be easy to suggest that Costas’ search for meaning between science and nature is a newly discovered search. Here I would include the British poets from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, who discovered that walking through the woods north of London was essential to poetry – that there were limits to writing poetry at one’s desk.
Even so, Costas Picadas is masterfully important in offering an alternative to the virtual technology that is getting in the way of allowing human beings to be human. As an artist he has taken it upon himself to bring nature back into science, that is, to understand the process of breathing and healing as it requires us to end separations that has prevented our ability to cure who we are and to take a new place in the arbitration of what it means to be human.
ROBERT MORGAN
Rhythms In Nature
Mary Hrbacek on May 17, 2023 -
Tenri Cultural Institute Presents Biomes and Homologies: Costas Picadas, an exhibition of large-scale multi-media works on canvas and smaller 3D model, photo-based prints on paper, curated by Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos. Picadas has created a stunning experimental group of hybrid visual artworks on canvas that blurs the boundaries between painting and drawing-based mixed media process art, making these works indefinable. His compelling daring innovations are unique. He blends the concept of painting, which is invoked by his use of canvas on wooden stretcher bar supports, with the reality of drawing by employing graphic materials such as oil pastels, charcoal and also acrylic.
Picadas is inspired by cells he carefully observes through a microscope, and by large plant forms that grow in outlying areas such as forests. He stresses the likenesses of the natural form he discovers, in order to comprehend their formations more clearly. In the fields of Chemistry and Biology, the dictionary definition of "homology" is "the state of having the same or similar relations, relative position, or structure." "Biome" defines a group or community of animal and plant life that coexist in the same habitat.
These abstract works are populated with multiple groups of ovals that have morphed into a rhythmic language with a quick pulse and throbbing tempo. The pictures are visual counterparts to musical compositions, with harmonies of various repeated beats and movements that draw viewer attention into the realms of muted gold, black and gray organisms. The cells seem to float upward, presumably toward the light. In several pieces the surface is laid over with wide masking tape which establishes richness through layers of "real" material that suggests an elusive unfathomable sense of time. Some of the white circular shapes that dominate several compositions may appear to be in progress. Sometimes the lines in the "Biomes" are loosely overlapped, with stress on the physicality of the materials; in other incidences the lines are drawn in relatively sensitive outlines around the circular forms of burgeoning cells. In a group of gleaming, 3-D Model photo-based print works there are hyper-real gold toned organs interspersed with delicate twigs that sprout small green leaves. The prints, entitled "Knee," "Heart," "Brain" and "Lungs," display an extreme realism that features golden disembodied organs set on a pure white paper ground that sparkle as if alive.
The artist comes from a family of doctors and practitioners who brought their medical knowledge into the home while he was growing up. Picadas applies transparent gauze over some areas of his large formats, symbolically representing the healing process of nature, as a doctor would do to protect a serious recovering wound. Transforming the infinitesimal cellular forms into the macroscopic visual formats allows Picadas to explore deeper relationships, to discover their underlying links that spark meaning and significance. He seems to have a compelling need to explore the intricacies of the cell forms and their variants, in mostly monochromatic compositions that stress color harmonies and neutral tones, especially gray and white. His work accentuates drawing, especially flowing stem-like shoots that stretch and flow among and between the circular shapes they surround. In Biome 3, the subtleties of charcoal establish visual interest where the fine details intermingle in the atmospheric interstices that connect the larger forms and shapes.
Picadas draws beautifully; he has brought this skill to a format that is traditionally used for paintings on canvas. There is an experimental component to Picadas's use of unusual medias in an unconventional format; oil pastels are delicate, but also accessible, which makes them a practicable choice for a direct approach to picture making. The artist has a tremendous affinity for shapes; he creates his homologies and biomes with honesty and emotion, with a commitment to transmitting the configurations of forms he finds under the microscope. He makes discernable changes and corrections that bring the images in the works closer to their true realities instilled with an almost perceptible feeling of movement and flux. Some of his shapes are inspired by the mitosis of cells in which a cell splits into two daughter cells with the same number of chromosomes.
Picadas considers art to be a powerful source of regeneration and sustenance that sparks our curiosity and appreciation for its beauty and complexity. Through links to our source in nature it serves as a reinvigorating element that nurtures the crucial human need for emotional expression. In contemporary global society dominated by technology we are increasingly cut off from a vital link with our organic roots. The artist has used various means to regain this interconnection; he has explored videos with monitors in gallery settings and projections on large buildings to achieve immersive environments. Picadas is convinced that as an artist he not only analyzes the underpinnings of nature, but in so doing he becomes one with the its rhythms in his works.
MARY HRSBACKEK
The art of Costas Picadas is equally persuasive in terms of its exemplary concept and course of development. Over the years, he has become a multi-media artist who works as decisively with painting as he does with photography and video. The major aspect of the latter works focuses on digital prints in which photographs of human anatomy are based on 3-D models. Here the artist is particularly involved with showing cellular life both in microcosmic detail and macrocosmic form. From another more tactile perspective, his paintings function in terms of expressionist detail whereby they might re-appear as intense gestural markings. The enlarged dimensions of Picadas’ recent paintings inform viewers of a revelatory painterly content in which the cellular content on the surface reveals a heightened, though understated expressivity.
Picadas’ concept of cellular life is generally true in his videos as well. These works add time to his images as shown in tapes featuring visual multiplications of cells that include delicately webbed images combining human and natural environments. Seen in this context, the paintings shown at Donopoulos International Fine Arts in New York, focus both on small and large-scale paintings. Herein the dimensions of his work focus on the initial creativity, the growth, and the delimitation of cells either within or superimposed from one painting to another. In either case, it is a matter of how we compare human and plant anatomy as being organic forms giving way to what is called horizontal rectilinear elements that include respondent tones of green, turquoise, and pink, among other prints of human organs.
Picadas’ focus on the universe and meta-verse might also recall aspects of the everyday world jointly matched, thus giving a rise to borderline tendencies that play a major role in terms of how we think, see, feel, perform, and communicate on a regular, routine basis. It is within this context that such works as Picadas’ Paintings 1-5 (2023) include the mental stamina to overcome the refusal to separate the equalization of universal and meta-versal modes in Picadas’ discourse.
Even so, the question is raised as to whether a fixed methodology might be of any use in determining which direction this interpretation might go – if, in fact, there is a necessity to do so. For the most part, discursive elements in Picadas’ paintings are somewhat less than relevant.
To elaborate is to suggest that the cellular structures being revealed by Picadas require both angles, not just one. Parameters, such as universe and metaverse, appear to function precisely in the context of anatomical life-giving organs as well as horticultural plants.
Herein Picadas’ paintings are open to interpretation at either end of the spectrum. Both organs and plants are equal on the video screen. Symbolically, the two combine to create a message of their own. Again, we asked to observe the universe and meta-verse within the context of what direction is being given and in what manner the message is being passed along. Not everything can be read from a fictitious point of view. Consequently, the overview is in the balance as to how the content of universe and meta-verse are revealed in relation to one another.
The legacy of Picadas is not difficult to discern. Fundamentally, it
argues in favor of giving our attention to reading the structure of the universe in relation to that of the meta-verse, each in the context of a holistic phenomenon. An obvious example would be seeing art not only aesthetically, but in connection to scientific experience possibly in relation to mathematical form. It would appear the artist is interested in working not only from the angle of separatism, but in direct relation to how these elements come to a focus during the course of everyday life.
ROBERT C.MORGAN
Costas Picadas comes from Greece, having been brought up in a family of doctors. But, eschewing that way of life, he decided to become an artist and studied in Paris before moving to New York City, where he now lives and works. A few years ago, his paintings were messy affairs, being taken up with dense overlays of rounded globular forms, much like the cells you might see in a microscope. Often, too, scribbles would make their way across the picture plane to the white sides framing the composition. The results were energetic and entertaining, as if the painting had forgotten its own boundaries.
But quite recently, Picadas has become a bit more restrained. His current works make use of similar drop-like forms, but the overlay of skeins of line is mostly gone. In consequence, the artist has moved more closely to classically defined abstract expressionism, an idiom so powerful it still effectively supports current efforts in the genre.
The ab-ex movement was enabled to a good extent by the efforts of foreign-born artists, and so Picadas is working within a decades-long tradition, It no longer makes sense to characterize this work as evidencing the original cultural influences on the artist practicing the style, Instead, the vernacular has become thoroughly international. The efflorescences of Picadas’s paintings are understood at once as joining the efforts of previous artists in New York.
Yet there are differences, too. Remembering the medical background of Costas’s family, we can imagine his imagery as coming from pictures taken with a microscope’s magnification. The works are hardly compositions for doctors to study, but perhaps there is a trace of medical rigor to be found in the pictures. In the painting Biome 2 (2022), globules in white, with designs within them drawn in a very light gray, drift across the entire composition. They are painted on a grayish wall of bricks. In the lower part of the work, small splotches of black dot the areas between the globules accompanied by pale green, inchoate forms and even a single golden form. This piece surely looks like a slide of some foreign bacterium. The surface, which is busy, carries the interest, although we are unsure about a precise meaning beyond the dense arrangement of diverging shapes.. In Biomae 11 (2022), a black vertical column acts as the major support of the image, but light blue-gray lines, forming circles and rough, undefinable forms, cover the dark mass rising upward. Thinner lines adorn the sides of the column, whose brute force is softened by the embellishments
In a separate but strikingly effective group of works, Picadas uses a computer process to generate imagery closely aligned with the body and with nature. The work is small and figurative, but exquisitely detailed in ways that emphasize not only the overall gestalt, but also the sharp details. Lungs (2023), Costas posts a highly detailed, highly realistic vision of the organs of breath: a trachea moves down the composition to split into two pipes, one each going to the semi-oval shape of each lung. Covering the lungs are small black blotches that combine with a tree-like maze of slender stems, ostensibly to carry the oxygen to the rest of the body. The graphic immediacy of the image astonishes; the sharpness of detail feels microscopic. In another image, called Heart (2023), the reddish-brown semi-oval shape of a human heart anchors the thin stalks bearing black blossoms that rise from the upper surface of the organ. Here anatomy meets the lyrical bent of nature, and both appear enhanced by the affiliation.
Picadas’s art reverses our expectations by merging the intuitions of the process, its justifications as an interpretation of what we see, with the much more stringent detailing of natural (or scientific) imaging. In his case, the merger makes sense in that he comes from a family whose vocation was scientific in nature. By softening his effects a bit, Picadas mkes it clear that the scientific methods contribute well to a view most effectively disposed toward painting, rather than to the rigors of the lab. Picadas uses his background well, but medicine never overtakes his pictorial intelligence. We can conclude that the painter’s merger, between cellular depiction and free-wheeling abstraction, consistently results in compelling art.
Jonathan Goodman
NIIO ART
Costas Picadas is an artist who currently lives and works in New York. Picadas studied fine arts and art history at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Louvre School in Paris, and has exhibited his works internationally at biennales, festivals, and galleries in Athens, Paris, Avignon, Amsterdam, and New York. Picadas’ works and art practice come from an awareness that we share a deep essence which is encoded in all organisms. Just like the mycelial networks hold the soil, the plants, and the trees together, humans share a practice of respiration which in the artist’s words allows us to stay grounded on this planet.Niio Art recently published Picadas’ new solo show titled World Inside Us composed of works from his Microbiomes. We sat down with Costas to discuss this latest project and his motivations to affect his viewers with this series.
Can you elaborate on the different technological tools used in the creation of your artworks? What is the balance that you use between found imagery and live documentation?
I work with many different techniques, I work with photography, painting, and drawing. I use new technologies like After Effects and augmented reality, and I am still investigating new technologies. But these are only tools, the essence of goal is in my concept. It’s important for me to have a very structured idea, and the tools are there in the service of my idea. The same goes for found imagery as opposed to images that I create. A good example is my inspiration from science. A few years ago, I was invited to give a lecture at the immunology department of Mount Sinai hospital where I expressed my interest in healing and met some very interesting scientists. They were kind enough to give me some medical slides of microscopic images with which I could recreate images combining nature and medical science. Through my concept I aim to blend images of nature with those of human biology in order to ascertain the existing underlying similarities in both ecosystems.
2. Your artworks show a deep understanding and interest in the study of nature. Can you please explain how this came about in your art practice?
Since I was a kid I was living the life of a saint and religion, I was intrigued by how these people become phenomena in healing themselves and other people. I was questioning how this is possible? Then I started to understand how ecosystems, like forests for example are completely autonomous and know how to heal themselves, reproduce themselves, and regenerate themselves which is the cycle of nature. We see the four seasons, we see the beginning, the end, the cycles. We have the human body that is born and dies. But nature regenerates itself in cycles, and I was fascinated by that. While walking one day I heard whispers from a tree, and I became interested in how an ecosystem knows how to live, die, and regenerate. The idea of how a given ecosystem can have these powers inspired the investigation in my own work. Moreover, I was curious about how art as part of human expression could possess this healing process, and how this aspect could possibly be transferred to our own bodies.
3. Your new series of works Biomes may remind some of paintings by artist Georgia O’Keeffe where we find a tension between abstraction and depictions of the natural world. Is it right to read your works in this way and how would you place your artistic practice within the trajectory of art history?
My new works Biomes are inspired by the seven Biomes that exist on our planet. One biome for example is the ecosystem of the forest, the second is the desert, third is the coral reef. In my works you will see many representations of coral branches breathing inside of their own ecosystem.
Of course, my works do have a fleeting connection to the images of Georgia O’Keeffe as well as other artists working with abstracted imagery. Every artist has a uniqueness but at the same time we are all connected. We may even be investigating the same things but we express them in different ways. We are all human beings expressing ourselves with the tools that we have as people. We express things with the tools that we have as human beings, but we use these tools in different ways. We investigate who we are and what life is. In human history we started expressing ourselves, eons ago. Art history demonstrates the uniqueness of what we have created. I don’t create art to become the history of art, I create art because I am interested in human nature and human life. You need centuries to define what has become important, you need distance from it. It’s all about consciousness. Technology changes now more than ever. We have the accumulation of knowledge. Artists of my era and I use what is new. 500 years from now, my work is going to be understood in terms of a cave painting. It’s something that we cannot even imagine. To say that my art will be part of art history we will need to see it from a distance.
4. Can you please dive deeper into your interest in the analogies of the human body and natural forms found in our outside surroundings?
Whatever exists in the universe is one energy, it’s the same energy. We investigate what we see on this planet. This planet started creating microorganisms and developed this nature. Only after many eons did humans come to this planet. Everything is connected in this same energy. Like you see in the forest, the whole forest is connected through fungi, through the mycorrhizal network, which is similar to what happens in the human brain. This energy represents very similar forms such as a tree, a human being, an animal. All the forms that we see are very similar to the brain and the human body because it’s the same energy and the same forms.
What I am trying to achieve with my works is to emphasize this consciousness that we are very similar and connected. People living in big cities, multiply. The human population doubled in the last forty years. Seventy percent of the population is suffering from depression. People get sick, there is no room in hospitals, and there are not enough doctors so what is the point. We have to understand our nature and our connection to nature. Why is the forest not depressed? Because it knows how to heal itself. As human beings we forget that we have the most developed brain and we forget how to deal with these things so we just get sick. I try to create comfort zones where people can see images of the human body and of nature and become more conscious of their own healing abilities.
5. As an artist who has worked with many different mediums from painting to photography to video art could you please provide your assessment of the digital arts and its potential to discuss complex subject matters and to reach wider audiences?
I think people are more and more interested in seeing a moving image, they like that experience and simulation. Technology is still relatively new, so people might think ‘oh this is not art’ but this is the same thing people said about photography years ago. I think people are more sensitive to the way we live today we think that we don’t have time to do many things. So, the more direct the message, the better it captures the attention of the public. Therefore, for me technology is a great tool. It’s an important tool. It’s very direct and captures people’s attention.
- Roxanne Vardi
Biomes and Homology in the works of Costas Picadas
The title of this show speaks to Costas Picadas’ use of the biome motif that informs his paintings and videos while examining the underlying similarities in all things. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines biomes as a major ecological community or type of natural organism that adapts as a group. In creating natural forms as seen under a microscope and in nature with the naked eye, Picadas searches for inherent homologies. Like the descent of the human organs in a body, homology is defined by the scientist G.G. Simpson as a “resemblance due to inheritance from a common ancestry.” Homology is often analogized due to a common function so that, for example a wing of a bird is compared with a forearm of a larger animal. However, Picadas’ search for underlying similarities is more than just an examination of Platonic ideal fundamental forms, it is an acknowledgment of the complexity of life.
Picadas through his works wants to heal nature a fact evinced in the use of gauze on his canvasses as a preparatory layer. Having come from a family of doctors Picadas’ salvational tendency is not surprising. But, the use of gauze is not just autobiographical, it is also art historical. Gauze was used with gypsum to prepare wooden panels in Fayum portraits as well as religious Byzantine icons. Gauze also offers protection in the repair of frescos wherein the support bandage is cotton gauze combined with Polyvinyl alcohol. It is usually applied with stucco and provides a light reflective background that imbues greater contrast to colors. This is seen in Picadas’ Biome 6 and Biome 7where the yellow undertones appear to be reflected in the foreground motifs.
Picadas’ Biomes series canvas-panels for the Tenri exhibition range in size from small 23x30” to 73x60 larger pieces. His curved motifs can be read as organic biome forms or biological cells in division and formation as they appear to meet and withdraw. Whereas this phenomenon of coming together and separating in his video projections appears in motion in his painted works the Biomesappear arrested in various phases of this process. Picadas’ use of color is soft, transparent, layered and bounded by curving line while relating to protozoa or biological cells. His scientific subjects arise from his desire to find the inherent connection in life thus, biological aspects like mitosis as inspired by the medical slides, are seen in much of his contemporaneous production both painted and filmed.
-Thalia Vrahopoulos
"Biomes and Homologies: Intertwining the Human and the Natural"
Description: "Biomes and Homologies" is an evocative collection of mixed media artworks that delve into the profound connections between the human body and the natural world. This captivating series portrays the intricate homologies that exist between our physical forms and the diverse biomes that sustain life on our planet. Through a masterful blend of organic textures, vibrant colors, and striking compositions, each artwork in the series invites the viewer to contemplate the innate kinship between humans and nature. As we immerse ourselves in these visual narratives, we are reminded of our shared origins and the delicate balance that binds us to the complex ecosystems of the Earth.
Alex Picadas
BREATHING IMAGES BY COSTAS PICADAS
For the last few years I have been meditating on the practice of breathing. All life has a breath, but sometimes our awareness limits us from even noticing our own.
I have brought life to my latest work, of which I call "Breathing Images." It's purpose is to bring inner wellness and an awareness of breath. I think it's important that we appreciate the miracle of respiration during a time many of us are affected by a shortness of breath.
In my latest ambitions I have been trying to bridge the gap between art and biology, creating a subject of the intricate universes that exist within us.
Art generally strives to provoke an emotional reaction in its viewers; with my work I try not only to evoke an emotional response but also a psychosomatic response. Numerous clinical trials and studies have shown that visual stimuli can have a real impact on a patient’s emotional and physiological state: as patient trials in Louis Schwartzberg’s Visual Healing project have shown, the addition of certain visual stimuli can result in a decrease in anxiety, an increase in pain tolerance and even a reduction in the length of a hospital stay. https://movingart.com/visual-healingIn my Biophilia series I try to inspire the benefits of visual healing in conjunction with controlled breathing to arouse a feeling of health and general well-being in the viewer.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLscVt0p0Of3aKNGK2D5SErmz3xKnGQHpW
I am inspired by all efforts to create art that is informed by science. I believe establishing relationships between artists and scientists is essential for further evolution of the symbiotic relationship art shares with man, and an important step in adapting art to a technological future.Last year I was invited by Mount Sinai to their Immunology Retreat where I exchanged ideas with and learned from many of the scientists present. I was lucky enough to be given microscopy images from their labs which birthed my Biophilia series. Myself and the scientists at Mount Sinai had the desire to portray their research through a lens that would inspire wonder in those without a formal scientific understanding.
My work comes from an awareness that we share an essence, something deeply embedded in the code of all organisms. We, like the mycelial networks which hold the soil together and the plants and trees that spring from them, share a practice of respiration, a rhythmic bid to stay grounded on this planet
- Alex Picadas
Costas Picadas: Merging Nature with Science
Costas Picadas, the son of a doctor, was raised in Greece, but he studied art in Paris and eventually made his way to New York, where he now lives and works in Astoria. A mid-career artist, he specializes in two-dimensional works and in videos that address, in wonderful ways, idioms based on nature and science, in particular the grandeur of forests and the cell forms associated with immunology, a branch of medicine he is particularly interested in. The combination is remarkable--there is a genuine sylvan lyricism to the forest pieces, dense with the thin trunks of trees and underbrush, as well as an inspired reading of the cell forms, which are imaginatively painted as part of the compositional language. The cell forms are notable not so much for their faithfulness to scientific reality as for their imaginative reconstruction of form.Picadas’s density of surface is brought about by a devotion to a lyric reading of nature and science.
His imagery arrives at a realism very close to the actualities that originated the painting. Yet his penchant for a natural verisimilitude is at the same time offset by the very abstract effects he is concerned with, in which different kinds of decorative efflorescences--patterns of curling lines, passages that look like mists, images impossible to conceive of unless the microscope is used as a guide--merge into genuinely large statements of vision.
But where does the vision originate? Picadas is not a medical researcher, although he has been affiliated with research institutes. Instead, he possesses the knowledge of someone raised in a medical family who has gone on to pursue studies in the fields of cellular biology, even though he has not become a professional researcher. Even so, his predilection for such material supports rather than overly complicates his artistic impulse. The paintings he is shown working on in videos are densely covered with non-objective embellishments, which are overlaid as though he were creating a palimpsest. The merger of abstract effects and forms that originate with real science gives Picadas the ability to bridge the gap between the intuitive and the analytical. How many artists can successfully bring this about? Interest between the realism of nature and the realism of science is equally shared in Picadas’s production, which establishes a lyric outlookmeant to praise the visible and invisible processes of nature’s forms and processes. This can be done only if the artist pays close attention to the shape of things, focusing on the realities, and also the imaginative visions, he is describing. To the artist’s credit, the integrity of his work is based on a close reading of visual possibilities that occur in the world, as well as an originality that is intuitive and conceived of outside of realism. His fidelity to nature is the source of his strength, but so is his originality
In contemporary art in America, we have an emphasis on politics and theory. Costas doesn’t deliberately reject these orientations, but he does invest his time in the promulgation of a visual art rather than an one that is overly intellectualized. His presentation of the densities of the natural world, often accompanied by music in his videos, promises a utopia that is increasingly undermined by our destruction of forests. It is rare for someone to so successfully merge a passion for the external world with the microscopic visualizations of cells. At the same time, in at least some of the work, we can point to the informal influence of the New York School, whose allover sense of composition Picadas picks up and makes good use of. But the fact that his true inspirations are science and nature moves him away from later generations of abstract expressionism. Instead, he produces, with considerable success, a language dictated by an intuitive eclecticism; this means he employs whatever is visually useful. Essentially a poet of nature despite living in an urban domain, Picadas makes art that reminds us of our ability to synthesize a composition across a spectrum of influences, not always closely aligned.
Jonathan Goodman
BREATHING TO CHANGE THE WORLD
by Clancy Bergman
COVID-19 has sent everyone inside to self-isolate, completely changing the world’s social dynamic. For many, some of the richest experiences were shared, like meeting a friend for a meal and a conversation. For artists, the richest experiences were sharing with others their dialogue with the universe -- unfortunately, restrictions birthed from our current pandemic have made this nearly impossible.
Costas Picadas is someone who has no problem adapting to the change. Studying in France in the 80s, he began as a painter but quickly expanded to incorporate sculpting and photography as well. Sculptures in the Refraction and Gravitation periods deal in positive space and seem to create an element of timelessness; animal sculptures and machine rotor parts are partially engulfed by a dense white block, conveying a freeze in time and space.
Timelessness is a consistent theme throughout the artist’s work, a quality that may prove unavoidable when primarily working in the medium of photography. Some works like Multiverse try to transcend still photography or at least engage in a dialogue with motion, by using long exposure to stretch and twist light into tendrillar structures. It was after a trip to Peru when Costas’ photography would evolve into a living, breathing entity.
“A few years ago I visited Macchu Picchu and the first thing that struck me was the fact I couldn’t breathe,” Picadas said. “In the low oxygen environment, I realized how fundamental breath was for a living being.”
He calls his latest work “Breathing Images,” pictures that have been manipulated to convey expansion and contraction. Some of his ‘Breathing Images’ loop in eight-second intervals while other in 19-second intervals, following Dr. Weil’s 4-7-8 breathing technique that is based on ancient yogic tradition.
“All the spiritual leaders talk about attaining mindfulness through the practice of breathing” Picadas said.
In giving his photography breath, the artist helps us see the spark of light present within all matter.
“If you go far in inspecting the anatomy of anything you will eventually encounter the particles, the atoms, electrons, neutrons,” Picadas said. “Everything has an energy, and in that sense, life.”
In his latest ‘Breathing Image’ set, Biophilia, he takes stills of nature and superimposes human microbiology over them to emphasize their structural similarities. Costas’ is a mind which is fascinated by the similarities between human and other biological structures. In his eyes, we are repeated simulations of the same phenomenon, adhering to mathematical formulae like Phi or the Golden Ratio. We are the universe experiencing itself through various forms.
The art strives to be the intermediary between art and science; both disciplines are our most important tools in navigating reality yet are divergent in their language. Like proponent of visual healing, Louie Schwartzberg, Costas creates with the intent to enlighten and heal. In Biophilia, brightly colored cells filled with fluorescent proteins dance over a backdrop natural structures to the tune of echoing mantras. The eclectic mixture of stimuli is tamed and brought into focus under the practice of the breath; an instructional voice permeates the neon cloud and guides the listener through each purposeful breath.
The power of breath is something that is being realized en masse. Through the vehicle of Youtube, Wim Hof, like Picadas, is bringing attention to the benefits that come from controlled breathing such as supporting immune function and stress relief.
On the benefits of controlled breathing, an excerpt from Hof’s website reads:
“The amount of oxygen that we inhale through our breathing, influences the amount of energy that is released into our body cells. On a molecular level, this progresses via various chemical and physiological processes. Breathing is the easiest and most instrumental part of the autonomic nervous system to control and navigate. In fact, the way you breathe strongly affects the chemical and physiological activities in your body.”
Costas takes it a step further than Hof, laying breathing instruction over images and video of human and plant anatomy.
Study after study has shown the healing effects of connecting with nature, for our physiology and our psychology. Among others, Schwartzberg and his Visual Healing have shown the world that, in clinical situations, biophilic imagery has reduced patient anxiety, increased pain tolerance, and even reduced the duration of hospital stays. Combining the practice of the breath with his own healing photography, the artist has the intention of healing the world.
The intention does not go unnoticed. Last year, Costas’ immersive Mitosis exhibition at Lytehouse Studios garnered the attention of immunologists. Through an introduction by art curator Cecilia Dupire, he was invited to Mount Sinai’s immunology retreat where he aroused interest and gained insight from medical experts. On the retreat he was bestowed with scientific data and cutting edge imagery of human cells and viruses -- content he utilizes in his latest work. Similarly, he is in dialogue with the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.
The great irony is that the respiratory virus at the center of this pandemic is not only plaguing human lungs but also the ‘Breathing Images.’ Like so many other artists, Costas’ work cannot be displayed because of the restrictions on large gatherings.
But an artist’s main goal is to use expression as the means to cure what ails us. The novel coronavirus has not impinged on Costas’ efforts but emboldened them with purpose. Not only is he working at ways of healing the human anatomy but the planet as well.
The freeze of humans’ deeply habituated routines has been a great inspiration for him and something he anticipates we’ll look back on as the turning point in our relationship with the planet.
Each of us, on a small scale, is contributing to the destruction of the planet just by engaging in what we consider normal behavior; driving gas-guzzling cars, and sipping from plastic coffee cups every single morning on our way to work. But we’re now seeing the benefits of taking a break from this behavior -- on a whole, carbon emissions have been reduced by 17 percent since we began this global quarantine. The waterways in Venice are clean, the skies in Beijing have turned blue again and in general, the Earth is healing.
For people like Costas’, these things have made our destruction of the planet apparent. This time is provoking a shift in our behavior to better care for our planet. In juxtaposing our form with that of Earth’s, Costas is contributing to this shift, inspiring reverence for the living organism we inhabit.
Costas’ passions and alignments are not only visible in his work but also the organizations he devotes his time to. From May 18-31, Costas has been working with the Roadmaps Festival as their artist in residence as they give talks about the future of climate change policy and our emergence from this global pandemic.
During the event on the 18th, Ali Velshi, NBC News Coordinator, described the artist’s work as the perfect “scene setter” for the discussion of climate change. The art is the perfect framing to tend to the climate; as we realize our organism is being ravaged by the virus, we also notice our destruction of the planetary organism.
-Clancy Bergman
Counterpoint: The Clarity of Costas Picadas
by Donald Brackett
The magic lantern we know as the camera first delivered a shockingly real reproduction of reality as early as 1827 by the French artist Joseph Niepce. Over almost two centuries, its startling conveyor belt of aesthetic growth (from glass to tin plates to paper prints) continued apace to include depictions of actual movement in cinema, then the cathode screen and eventually today’s digital computer terminal. Enter Picadas.
Welcome to the future history of photography: a utopia of pure images, a somewhat surreal realm in which our presumed yet arbitrary borderlines between the real and the imagined are deftly erased by the aesthetic prowess and technical skill of the artist. These splendidly pale gems are chromogenic prints, colloquially known as c-prints, but they are digital c-prints, where the image content is exposed through lasers rather than chemicals. Created in limited editions of five, with variable scales, and face-mounted to plexiglass, they are also invitations to a fresh kind of visual experience, one consisting of crystal clear clarity.
What Arbus did for faces and figures, the Greek-born and New York-based Picadas seems to do for places and buildings: he reveals their inner essence by rubbing gently on their surface qualities to unearth from beneath their architectural facades either their secret countenance or their psychic landscape. His dream-like vistas, with portions either fading into or out of diffused optical focus, offer the viewer a whole new and vastly expansive dimension of hidden significance. They are retinal balms that soothe the weary eyes of our digital age, and yet they too are also digital gifts, pulling us into the otherworldly architectonic realm of the everyday world we inhabit.
Picadas, who grew up in Athens before studying in Paris and eventually gravitating to the ultimate conceptual country of America, has wholeheartedly embraced the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, to update Walter Benjamin’s fine study of the visual aura. He masterfully uses technology, including photoshop techniques, to push photography towards its next frontier: the photograph as a seductive phantom in a meticulously designed zone of precisely calibrated ethereal visions. The subtle power of their visual charms is often quite breathtaking: they evoke the very core phenomenology of photography itself.
The three principal bodies of work presented here, the Aether, Hyperbola and Voids series respectively, all beckon us into a totally familiar and yet utterly alien nexus of humanly inhabited netherhoods. They explore a domain reconstructed from the raw materials of our world yet transmuted through the artist’s imagination into new world, one at once inviting and forbidding in its austere elegance. He unveils a sequence of mysteriously lux-collaged urban landscapes whose inhabitants seem to have abandoned their dwelling places and vanished into time.
His oneiric (from the original Greek word for dream) vistas provide literal expression of the original meaning of the word photo-graphis: writing or drawing with light, in this case, with hyper-precise laser light. These three bodies of work are veritable celebrations of clarity itself as content. Being what I might call an imagineer, an engineer of images, his aesthetic agenda is a very straightforward one: “I like to create emotions in the viewer, which are then followed by their asking of certain questions. While considering these questions, the viewer can experience a kind of stopping of time: it is when time stops that magic starts, and with it, the open opportunity for enlightenment begins.”
Aether, a classical element in Greek mythology, was thought to be a material filling the lofty regions of the universe above the terrestrial sphere, an upper sky which also filled every speck of matter in both space and throughout time. It personifies the universal substance. The great thing about enlightenment is the fact that it can also often be so damn entertaining, as in the calm splendour of “Aether 3” and “Aether 6” for instance, with their mysterious dolmen-like stone and ghostly shed with no entrance. These are liminal, or threshold experiences par excellence.
Hyperbola, in classical mathematics, is a type of smooth curve lying in a plane and is one of three kinds of conic sections formed by the intersection of a plane and a cone. The original Greek word means over-thrown or excessive, as in extremis or at the very limit of potential encounter. “Hyperbola 3” and “Hyperbola 11” each register a cool-headed variety of extremity however, with their box-like structures confounding the concept of interior or exterior and also offering up a perplexing riddle of reflections.
Voids, especially the cosmic kind, are vast spaces between filaments which contain very few or no galaxies, and as such they have come to be associated with vacuums or emptiness and space without matter. Far from actually being empty however, they form the supporting basis for which anything at all can ever exists. As such, his “Voids 11” and “Voids 4”, throb with the paradox of offering more than one void: a tree, rock and wall interacting with their surroundings and baked by a sunlight so intense it scorches our vision. Likewise “Voids 6” and Voids 1” also create a theatrical stage set feeling where a recurring character in his works, “the wall”, is an actor in a dramatic monologue for silent stone voices.
For Roland Barthes, each photograph was a veritable “certificate of presence”, one which embodies time in a spatial manner. Equally true of Picadas is the mesmerizing fact of being a document of absence, in which any trace of habitation is willfully withheld. I suspect this is because we ourselves, as the viewers, are the only dwellers in this serene and spooky reverie-soaked domain. Besides, all the potential human dwellers of these agora-like spaces appear to have collected together all at once into one spectacularly funneled crowd scene in the figure-filled “Hyperbola 2”.
The stillness in these exquisite images makes it difficult for me not to be reminded of the poet Goethe’s charming definition, that music is liquid architecture and architecture is frozen music. This artist appears to be exploring what is known as the architectural uncanny, structures both very familiar yet alien, witnessed as in a waking swoon using the polysensorial gaze: a visual experience that stimulates both the senses and the intellect simultaneously. Thus, his photographs feel to me like melting timescapes, since they so clearly examine what Bachelard called the poetics of space.
These three principal bodies of work also convey to us the allure of three other ancient Greek concepts: Apeiron: that which is limitless, boundless, indefinite, and without boundary; Aletheia: a personification of the unconcealed, a symbol of disclosure and truth; and Kairos: meaning the right, critical and opportune moment, there being two words for time, chronos (sequential time) and kairos (the right time for action).
Picadas images are all about the poised magic of kairos, perhaps especially the boldly quiet interlopers in this curated selection, the sudden bursts of colour contained in two pieces referencing Tachyons, hypothetical particles that move faster than light and contravene the known laws of physics, and Quarks, a type of elementary particle making up the constituency of all matter everywhere.
Thus “Tachyon 13” and “Quark Tunneling 14” both bring us back by circuitous navigation to the realm of the optical unconscious: a subtle place where painting first intersects with technology, and they do indeed resemble theatrical painterly excursions into an alternate reality. As I see it, his primary artistic interest is how to bridge the gap between inner and outer reality by reestablishing the dynamic equilibrium that governs their relationships.
As he himself puts it so very well, “In my photographs I examine and reveal the ways in which one can freezeboth space and time by re-contextualizing different parts of reality and recombining them in new ways. The result is that both objects, and even situations, can be transformed into a kind of sculpture, providing us access to new knowledge about the nature of our reality.”
In keeping with that basic photographic tenet but also uniquely distinguished from it, in the case of Costas Picadas, his photographs are still secrets about a secret, except the less they show us, the more we know.
- Donald Brackett
Costas Picadas’ Breathing series is part of an ongoing exploration of metaphysical textures in the universe. Inspired by a biblical passage that suggests breath is what powers all life, the artist investigates this possibility in all matter. From building installations to individual moving images, the Breathing series imitates patterns of human breath that embody a deep dimensional expression. Comprised of multiple layers that shift and twist, and emerge and recede, the artist symbolically examines quantum physics theories of expansion and contraction of the universe. Through abstract imagery and hand-painted particles, each monochromatic picture offers a distinct breathing pattern. While some particles cyclically push forward and float back in measured counts, others surge ahead with a burst of energy, only to decompose into empty space. Flickering in between hints of focus and galactic swirls, Breathing series aligns itself with the process of transformation, tracking energy as it changes metabolisms.
--Heather Zesis
Costas Picadas’ WIMPs series is part of an ongoing exploration of metaphysical textures in the universe. Inspired by a biblical passage that suggests breath is what powers all life, the artist investigates this possibility in all matter. From building installations to individual moving images, the WIMP's series imitates patterns of human breath that embody a deep dimensional expression. Comprised of multiple layers that shift and twist, and emerge and recede, the artist symbolically examines quantum physics theories of expansion and contraction of the universe. Through abstract imagery and hand-painted particles and neurons, each monochromatic picture offers a distinct breathing pattern. While some particles cyclically push forward and float back in measured counts, others surge ahead with a burst of energy, only to decompose into empty space. Flickering in between hints of focus and galactic swirls, WIMPs series aligns itself with the process of transformation, tracking energy as it changes metabolisms.
“Costas Picadas’ work is about light and it’s energy. His recent work Photon expresses metaphorically light and its radiation. “A photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of the electromagnetic field including electromagnetic radiation such as light, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force (even when static via virtual photons). The photon has zero rest mass and always moves at the speed of light within a vacuum. Like all elementary particles, photons are currently best explained by quantum mechanics and exhibit wave– particle duality, exhibiting properties of both waves and particles. ”
-REGINA HARSANYI
“In his inventive “Quark Tunneling” print series Costas Picadas creates a profound worldview in poetic tableaux where the underpinnings of science and philosophy inform captivating ethereal images. Picadas delves for inspiration into the foundations of quantum mechanics, evoking in comprehensible visual formats the essence of visible light that can behave both as elementary particles (photons} and waves. The artist highlights these innumerable minuscule particles to produce galaxies of forms, the visual equivalent of shapes that travel at the speed of light. His stunning prints conjure the aftermath of explosions in which the forces generate fierce winds that obliterate normal visual perception and specified boundaries. Radiant white light illuminates a gamut of fallout whose particles pepper the surfaces of mingling forms and dark figures. Picadas creates systems of intricate shapes whose shifting spatial orientations signal a fresh way of perceiving a morphing universe that may herald symbolically the impending advent of a new metaphysical existence. The incisive “Time Dilation” prints, with the grandeur of their dazzling architectural elements and floating fragments, elicit feelings of infinity and eternity. With sweeping mazes of shapes set within reflective metallic beams, the artist builds a universe of variations in structures that might plausibly provide habitats for the future. The vibrant majesty of these compelling works renders their challenging message optimistic. The prints provide alternative visions of conceivable realities in a symbolic domain of awe and wonder. These insightful brilliant works, situated in a sphere of time, space and existence trigger feelings that are complex and liberating. ”
— Mary Hrbacek
Costas Picadas’ photographs are an exploration of science, philosophy, light and energy. His ethereal images capture a morphing universe comprised of abstracted forms, vibrating particles, and floating fragments. Working primarily with a monochrome palette, Picadas blurs internal and external space through stunning dimensional expression.
_ Heather Zesis
Costas Picadas and Being
Picadas’ series Mitosis, 2019 comprised of video projections examines the phenomenon of DNA and the transfer of information via cell division. On a broader scale, the series deals with metaphysical issues about the very nature of existence. Picadas explores the relationship between mind and matter in works that surround and embrace the viewer in their soft yet complex environments. In his multi-layered projections the positive and negative space resulting from the depicted branches and blossoms, become metaphors for spirit and matter. These palimpsests simultaneously reference the division and multiplication inherent in the mitosis process, the theme of his series.
His works undulate, as his elements expand and contract, become abstract and slightly representational, more solid or transparent concluding in artworks that metamorphose into multiple phantasmagorical forms. They can be read as flames or as veils, but although their shape may constantly alter and change, Picadas’ allusions to physical matter set against numinous spirituality in this series of works are constants. Picadas’ projections wrap themselves around the installation and molding to the space thus offering us environments in which we can be surrounded by his visual vocabulary and its powerful message.
-Thalia Vrahopoulos
Picadas creates photographs and video installations of places, situations and architecture that not only reveal their inner essence but also hint at dark unknown recesses. By partially stripping away the surface features of an image, the artist unearths visions that give rise to both a secret countenance and a psychic inner landscape. The artist explains, “In my photographs I examine and reveal the ways in which one can freeze both space and time by re-contextualizing different parts of reality and recombining them in new ways. The result is that both objects, and even situations, can be transformed into a kind of sculpture, providing us access to new knowledge about the nature of our reality.”The current works on view include photographs from Costas Picadas’ Mitosis series as well as video works from the series entitled Expansion 2. Mitosis continues the artist's ongoing exploration of the metaphysics of universal forms. His images examine the intricacies of DNA and the transfer of information via cell division. The surfaces seem to undulate, as elements expand and contract, become abstract and slightly representational, more solid or transparent concluding in artworks that metamorphose into multiple phantasmagorical forms. In the multi-layered Expansion 2 video projections, the positive and negative space resulting from the dynamic blooms become metaphors for spirit and matter. Picadas’ projections wrap around and mold to the space, creating richly enigmatic environments. His dream-like vistas, with portions either fading into or out of diffused optical focus, offer the viewer a whole new and vastly expansive dimension of hidden significance.
- Tanya Berlinsky
I started working on the Biophilia series two years ago but ever since the onset of the pandemic, the drive behind the project became ever more intense and purposeful. What made me start work on the series was a nagging awareness that I had about the way in which we were treating the planet—we cut down and burn the planet, we pollute it and we exploit it. I knew that art had to play a role in expanding our awareness around the treatment of the planet. And when the pandemic came about, I thought there was no better time for humans to realize how their daily activities contributed to the degradation of the Earth and how those relationships could be rethought. But it was also time for reflection, for humans to see the ways they were also damaging themselves with their fast paced lifestyles. I think those two aspects of the awareness that the pandemic brought are related—the structures of the human organism are but a microcosm of the larger organism that is the planet, so when humans choose to take care of the planet, they will also be unconsciously taking care of themselves. Biophilia is meant to underline those unconscious connections that humans have with nature.
I grew up within a family of doctors—all the men except me became doctors while I grew into the role of an artist, so questions to do with anatomy and the human body have always fascinated me. A few years ago I became intensely interested in the ways the human body worked, specifically the way that the human body is constantly involved in a process of cellular reproduction. Meiosis, Mitosis and Expansion were the three series before Biophilia that most intimately dealt with those topics. I find that both disciplines, medicine and art, are interrelated in the sense that they provide tools to help heal the body and mind.
At this point in my career, a collaboration with a hospital is important to me because I’m constantly striving to create a dialogue between art and science, the two greatest movers of culture and society. To foster this symbiosis, I want to involve several professionals in the medical field—we’re not yet at a point where society understands or accepts the healing benefits of art, so having medical professionals to bridge that gap is necessary. I also am hoping to create a meditation space in a hospital where my artwork can be displayed and its healing benefits conferred to the patient.
Research keeps coming out about the importance of conscious breathing. It’s the most fundamental aspect of our lives on this planet. My art has always had the intention of bringing to awareness the importance of our breath. And now, with our current pandemic, we have been shocked into realizing the importance of this hardly acknowledged phenomenon. We breathe 22,000 times a day, how many of your breaths are conscious?
My philosophy maintains that art is just as valuable a tool in the attainment of self-actualization, well-being and the evolution of our species as the discipline of science. For this reason, I am constantly inspired by the new and exciting ways our society is looking to solve the problems we once thought were only solvable through science. There is an unspoken link between science and art that I am always striving to develop and bring to notice. This pandemic finds us at a crossroads between an emphasized focus on health and the diminishing returns of medical science—new and interesting solutions, that remind us about who we are as a species, are always on the horizon and I hope to be a part of that solution.
Deep breathing serves to trigger relaxation, which causes the blood capillaries to expand, allowing more oxygen to travel to locations where healing is needed. Deep breathing using our diaphragm efficiently pulls oxygen into all areas of our lungs, which is more beneficial than shallow chest breathing.
ALEX PICADAS
Costas Picadas: Finding the Ties between Science and Nature
Costas Picadas, who is originally from Greece but who has lived in New York City for many years, comes from a medical family. His father, a facial surgeon, inculcated in Picadas a continuing interest in science, which makes itself known in his art mostly as the shapes of cells. The artist’s other great focus is nature, a topic of large interest in art today, which he focuses on primarily in the short lyric videos he creates by merging cell imagery with natural scenes. The same hybrid regularly occurs in his paintings and drawings, in which cell forms, sometimes precise and sometimes rawly formed, often spill out from the field of the composition onto the white frame surrounding it. We are living in a time close to disastrous in an ecological sense; our sense of space is slowly but surely being diminished by human development, which turns nature into something domestic rather than wild. Picadas, who makes his home in a great urban center, nonetheless remains profoundly concerned with showing how nature might persist, despite the invasiveness of people. In the lyric videos, this is especially true; Picadas moves in these works in a direction of pure emotion, structured by pictures of flowers, trees, bodies of water, and the more measured imagery of science, cells especially, which introduce a rigor into his deeply felt treatment of the exterior world.
We need to remember that the situation of art is changing in America, where one’s social practice has become as important to work as the imagery one uses. This is not the case in Picadas’s efforts, which present a lyricism meant to assuage rather than confront. The new video he has finished, close to ten minutes long, establishes a rapidly changing sequence of scientific imagery imposed on woodlands and opening blossoms intended to justify and join science with the random profusion of the outside world. Picadas, in his remarkably poetic view, is taking the chance that a romanticism can inform his work in the beginnings of the 21st century, when ecological concerns are close to being overwhelmed. So Picadas is deeply interested in healing--the vocation of both his father and himself in differing fields. It is an unusually brave stance in a time when sincerity in art is measured much more by political belief than empathy.
Costas’s group of recent paintings, entitled “Biomes,” are filled with rounded forms that often crowd out the naturally inspired imagery available behind them. They are a mass of cells whose close alignment creates a world of its own: a biome, which is a large land aggregation, complete with flora and fauna. In the case of these paintings, one comes across organic forms, circles and ovals sometimes linked by a narrow passage to a second similar shape. Interestingly, despite the sophistication of Costas’s concept, the imagery itself is direct to the point of being demotic. Perhaps this is the artist’s way of relaying his understanding of current life: a mix of energetic abandon and random events impossible to make sense of--and often in opposition to cultural achievement. Something similar occurs in the drawings, which present a wider variety of forms--ovals and elongated lozenges--and in a number of occasions can be more brightly colored. At times, the imagery in both paintings and drawings can be so freely rendered as to remind the audience of expressionist abstraction. It becomes clear that the artist is not necessarily given to nature alone, that he is a participant in culture as well.
Even though the passion of Costas s is evident from the start, in the long run it is evident that his art cannot save the slowly dying ecology that we find almost everywhere. This makes the work sad from the start; perhaps we could describe his outlook as a lamentation as much as an optimistic reading of the future. But that doesn’t do justice to the works’ claims either. There is too much energy in what he does to see the work merely as a eulogy. The new video, like the earlier ones, possesses a visual freedom we can only associate with a positive stance. Costas’s energies, evident as examples of natural force and as links to the New York School, tie together in a remarkable union of intuitive and objective intelligence. We walk away from his art thinking about the imperiled condition of the world, but we also find ourselves entranced by a point of view that asserts the primacy of life, not to mention the highly developed visual achievement he is responsible for.
Science, a human activity, and perhaps the only area of study in which we can help nature heal, is also a great theme. It is highly unusual to find an artist transforming the tragic drift of nature into an earlier, even an original condition as a distinctive force. Energy, its persistence in the face of the dying biome, is the true subject matter of the artist, who has developed a body of art that helps keep nature alive.
Jonathan Goodman
BIO
Costas Picadas was born in Ioannina Greece. He studied art at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts and art history at the Louvre School in Paris. Picadas’ work has been exhibited, among other places, at Queens Museum- Bulova NY, Paris Kohn Gallery NY, Denise Bibro Gallery NY, The Blender Gallery Athens Greece,Donopoulos Gallery GR, Gallery Gransart Paris, Mykonos Biennale Greece, The Young Art Fair in Switzerland, Gallery J&J Donguy Paris, Some Young New Yorkers III at PS1 NY, Kappatos Gallery, Athens, Greece, Gallery de Buci Paris, Gallery Anatole Chartres, France, Gallery de Nest Paris, Salon de Montrouge, Paris, W.G. Amsterdam, Holland, and the Festival of Avignon, France. Articles, reviews and critical analysis of Picadas’ work appear in solo and group show catalogues in addition to newspapers and magazines in France, Greece and New York, such as Zing Magazine, Absolute Arts, New York Spaces, White hot, Flash Art and more . Since 1994 he has been living and working in New York City.
1966 Born in Ioannina Greece
1986-1990 Studied at the Division of Contemporary Arts at the Ecole du Louvre of Paris
1986-1990 Studied at Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris
Currently living and working in New York
Selection of group and solo Exhibitions:
2024
The Opening Gallery -NY Solo Brain
York Gallery -Aesthetica-London UK
Santorini M museum-GR
2023
SEDITIONS ART-new NFT launch -UK
NIIO art -NFT launch -US
The opening gallery -NY
TENRI cultural Institute-NY
Santorini M museum-GR
Art on Paper -AR booth-NY
Paris kohn Gallery-NY
GIAFF -Limlip museum Seoul-Korea
Equinox AR -Zagreb Croatia
UIAF art fair Ulsan-Korea
Donopoulos gallery-NY
Iconica Fine Art-Digital show on Artsy
2022
SEDITIONS ART-England
Frequency mind -NY
Donopoulos Gallery-Greece
Back to Athens-International art festival-Athens Greece
FADA-Festival arts design-Acerenza Italy
CADAF NY-@WEB 3 Gallery NY
Art on Paper -Art fare -NY
Theofano Foundation prize-Greece
SIHAF art fare-Seoul Korea
Equinox-Public installation AR-Zagreb Croatia
Paris Kohn Gallery-NY
2021
Kreemart project-Pardon me-NY
Ornare -NY-Southamptons
Aesthetica magazine Symposium-UK
SNARK ART-First drop
CADAF- Crypto Art fair-NY
NAIA-Southampton-NY
NUSHAMA-NY video projections-NY
2020
GIANNY-installation-Lecture- NY
Roadmaps Festival-Artist in Residence on line-3 Events-NY
CADAF Digital Art fare-NY
KTBE Theater on Aristophanous Birds -Greece
NAIA at Capri-Southamptons-NY
TED -X Vail-TED talks -COUNTDOWN-VAIL-USA
2019
Prism 2019-Lenfest Center for the Arts-NY
ARTLOFT -Berlin -Germany
Lytehouse-VIdeo installation -NY
ON CANAL 318 gallery-Video installation -NY
Mykonos Biennial 2019-Greece
Dreamideamachine Gallery-Greece
inside Out and Beyond Greek Embassy -NY
2018
Anya and Andrew Shiva gallery -NY
Odon Wagner gallery –Toronto Canada
Mise en scene gallery -CT USA
Toronto Art fair-ART TO-Canada
2017
Gallery Paris Koh NY
Mykonos Biennial 2017-Greece
2015
The Blender Gallery, Athens, Greece
Voce Di, New York
2013
Mykonos Biennale-Greece
Ithaka Art Festival "Ithaka Returned" -Greece
Museum of Modern art-Crete Rethymnon-Greece
2003
Denise Bibro Gallery ,New York
Gallery LS-Crete Greece
2002
Budman Gallery - New York
2000
Queens Museum-BULOVA- New York
2001
Gallery Michael Lombardi , New York
1999
The Young Art Fair , Basel, Switzerland
Gallery J&J Donguy , Paris
Criss Cross: Some Young New Yorkers III At P.S.1 , New York
Kappatos Gallery , Athens Greece
1995
Graphic Arts Fair At Waldorf Astoria , New York
Galerie Anatole , Chartre, France
Galerie De Buci , Paris
Salon De Mai , Paris
1994
Salon De Montrouge , Montrouge, France
La Ruée Vers L'Eure At Chartres, France
Ex-Voto At St. Romain Space Of New York
1993
Galerie De Nestle Of Paris France
Mini Print Slovenia At The International Exhibition , Slovenia
Novembre A Vitry Of Vitry-Sur-Seine, France
Itineraire At Levallois-Peret, France
Amsterdam W.G. , Amsterdam Holland
Biennal De Peinture , Issey-Les-Moulineaux, France
Hospital Saint Louis , Paris France
Galerie Gransart , Paris france
1992
SPADEM - Associates Des Arts Plastiques , Paris
Espace Michael Simon Of Noisy-Le-Grande, France
Hotel Imperial Of Annecy, France
Galerie Gransart of Paris
New Medical Center of Orleans, France
Musée du Grand Orient de France of Paris
1991
Galerie De Nestle , Paris France
Exposition Internationale D'Arts Plastiques - Palais Des Arts , Nice, France
Festival D'Avignon, Avignon France
Institute Espagnol De Paris, Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France
1990
Galerie de Nestle , Paris, France
International Art Competition, New York
