Sophie Costa - The joyful melancholy of New Pop

Between Outsider Art and New Pop—this group formed on June 23, 2005, in the Parisian apartment of art dealer Thierry Salvador—Costa's creations bring to the eye and the heart the strange and melancholic sensation of a journey back in time. For Sophie, the romantic extrovert, creation is neither an intellectual process nor a marketing exercise; period after period, she asserts a synthesis of influences to capture, within the framework of a surprisingly open body of work, the geopoetic expression of an era for which she acts as both spokesperson and recycler-journalist. Our era. Which, ultimately, has changed very little since Warhol and the original Pop Art, if anything, for the worse.

There is a long way, certainly, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Fred Vargas to Pedro Almodóvar and Bashung, but not so long in the end. For it is this substantial convergence of artistic references, poetic emotions, and creative gestures that Sophie Costa stages and contextualizes. With the conviction of reclaiming the fleeting image, or rather, of reconnecting, collage after collage, with that sensitive adolescence made of intuition and aspiration. The intuition of an aesthetic relevance in taste and flavor, the intuition of a probable and possible freedom to be and to dream in the evanescent candor of the creative moment. Just after. Just before. And Rauschenberg, and Johns, and Warhol, but also Claude Gellée and Maurice Barrès, then, granted him permission to reinvent his present according to the energetic and radical graphic code of the Pop universe and the intuitive atmosphere of the true modernists. The time of a powerful idea, and the journey freezes in the instant of a superimposition of images. Of lines. Of colors. Like so many strata of a perpetually moving memory. Like so many emotional references.

In music, as always, she circumscribes the work in gestation, redefining its contours, establishing its depth, and delivering the birth certificate of a chronicle of events or literature—a journey, an encounter, an emotion, a wandering.

In the dual manner of Warhol and Pollock, she instills the present into our gaze through the fluid force of her gesture and the rendering of primary colors. The hallmark of the famous cosmopolitan New Pop. With added melancholy and then impertinence. Like a borrowing from Warhol's iconography. Like a particular devotion to the Pop universe. Like a reactivation of the pivotal era of contemporary creation. This illuminating and rebellious period when the present asserted itself in the irreverent images of the avant-garde, rejecting the conceptual and the geopolitical. Throwing wide open the doors to a future lived in the present or the infuture.

Sophie Costa, a painter and visual artist of her time, in her own time, is mindful of this major reinterpretation of Gilles Deleuze's famous phrase, "What could be more cheerful than the spirit of the times?", which has become, for her and all the New Pop artists, "What could be less cheerful than the spirit of the times?" This allows her to offer the viewer a series of contrasting images of our societies, exhausted and lacking in imagination. Without ever resorting to aesthetic paraphrase, she aims to reveal, through committed painting, the major influences that shape minds and hearts to the point of nausea or anguish.

Between Pop and narrative abstraction, Sophie Costa thus moves forward with complete transparency. Untangling the confused threads of the digital and television age that inundates us with information overload and iconization, she develops the moment into a series of photosensitive flashes that become paintings, much like other books, music, or films. Coca-Cola cans rescued from the dustbins of boredom, bus or metro tickets held onto after use as existential relics, torn magazine pages, cardboard advertisements, iconoclastic finds from urban strolls—all these elements now transcend mere commercial anecdotes to become part of the constructivist and poetic approach of an artist who sees herself as a subjective witness and geopoetic protagonist. For Sophie Costa's work is not simply a display of prestige, stripped of gravity, but a clear sign of the event-driven relationship of a reality subjugated by plastic metaphysics. It is an aesthetic and civic affirmation of an attentive and curious presence. A presence displayed with aplomb in the face of the absence that is gradually becoming the hallmark of our postmodern Western societies.

From this mise en abyme worthy of Jackson Pollock, the journey becomes a passage from one emotion to another, from one universe to another, from one radicalism to another. And from this succession of offbeat perspectives on the era emerges a graphic series that Barrès, once again, would have humorously defined as a genre novel. A chronicle without beginning or end, which, to the point of vertigo, takes on the stature of a redemption through the image frozen in the object.

Then, today, comes Lettrism. The eruption of a new language and raw or melancholic messages, whether subjugated or disillusioned, into a work undergoing poetic transformation. A blend of New Pop and Fluxus, an affirmation of disenchantment or hope, these small words, these small woes, are so many cries of alarm or pleas for tears from a generation levitating digitally around the foundational concepts of our outdated ideologies. Freedom regains its taste and substance in the literary expression of graphic or plastic thought.

Love here is not merely Bowie-esque love, and it is certainly not the superfluous pronouncements of an artist who has reached the limits of metaphysical illusion and the positivist critique so dear to the prince of international critics, the renowned Achille Bonito Oliva. He, who asserted with conviction and consistency that art cannot be limited to a banal application of graphic, aesthetic, or marketing precepts, but must once again become the affirmation of an idea or an emotion. Like him, Sophie Costa seems to be on a journey toward pure emotion, that strange and complex feeling that reveals and challenges us at the dawn of a new era, both unsettling and exhilarating.

Salvatore Lombardo, November 2014.