Ada Costa

Ada Costais an artist who engages in research. Her visual exploration began in the 1970s when she created an informal language of her own with a visual alphabet that was initially compiled of pure signs - horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. These signs would later evolve into modules that were often arranged in spirals.

Out of two-dimensional space the artist gradually developed more complex three-dimensional spatial forms that had loose affinities with neo-avant-garde movements, spatialism, optical art, minimal and conceptual art. In the 1980s the ‘circle’ became an important sign. In the words of P. Restany ‘in the heart of a sphere one can delineate a horizon, a heaven, and an earth’ and going beyond that limit ‘one can develop an even deeper extension so to speak, a little like a coal seam in a mine’.
The spherical element later becomes the basis for columns and half-columns inspired by Doric forms, their centre of gravity placed at midpoint or forwards. Mirrors arranged on the floor interact with them in an ambiguous optical play reflecting their silhouettes and creating equivocal tricks of light, pierced or merely touched by fine red laser rays that make them even more alluring. They are sculptures seen as spaces and situations rather than as forms, and the elements that go to make them up can be reassembled.

Ada Costa now adds the element of light to the space of the work. She chooses GLASS as the ideal material for her installations that are imposing but at the same time light. It is reproduced in primary geometric forms, with the square or cube being replicated in particular.
Mirrors and glass, the infinite and reflections: almost a search into the self, but at the same time losing the self in the infinite and inconsistency of being. Glass is hard yet breakable. At the same time it reflects light, and its transparency belies the perception of its thickness and consistency.
One can thus become aware of the self and recognise its limits through the works of Ada Costa: the artist transfers her own and our mental space into the geometry and mathematics of the volumes of her transparent pyramids, into the structural relations between the elements, into the ambiguity and infinite depth of the mirror.
These works therefore form a trait d'union between physical space, nature and the ‘spiritual corporeity of the universe’, with a sensitivity approaching oriental spirituality.