Art in Quarantine — Diogo Costa
UMBIGO invited several artists to reflect on the era we are living in and to think about their artistic production in quarantine times.
Project by the artist Diogo Costa.
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Diogo Costa, 13/03/2020. Digital Collage
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A set of visual compositions, based on a digital collage, results from a reaction to the current circumstance of quarantine and social isolation in which I find myself, like so many others at a global level.
These compositions formed by the inclusion of line, shape, color, text and photographic image, were vehicles of expression used to reflect around the theme of space and stillness in times when instability took over globality and everyday life.
Painting, photography and still-life were references chosen to give shape to an intuitive approach that seeks to rescue and reflect these themes as a response to the conditions that are currently being experienced.
In the history of artistic practice, artists and art agents have sought throughout the ages and through their practices, to promote and preserve the quality of stillness, as a principle underlying creativity. Quietness, often combined with introspection and self-awareness, appears again to me as parallel responses to the instability of the outside world.
It is in this context that I try to transmit these values through images that present themselves as visual metaphors. Through composition and collage I try to recreate both the inner reflection of my confinement experience and the visualization of an almost ideal place, so often shaken and compromised by external circumstances in the course of history.
Traditionally I use the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, but being confined, away from the studio, from the materials and projects of my craft, the digital image appears as a favorite medium to fill the impossibility of what was before my usual practice.
The works that are in the studio, far from the confinement of home, are now suspended, frozen until a new visit. In the suspension of rediscovering the works that are now also confined to their space, I find in this approach the possibility for shaping the thoughts and inclinations that I used to adress before, now informed by the condition that we all are linving together.