Pietro Costa’s “Drawings”
Between Art and History
by Robert Mahoney
March 2001
Every week or so artist Pietro Costa retreats to his quiet studio opposite the rectory and gym of an old neighborhood church in brownstone Brooklyn – the kind of building that sports a Marian memorial to the dead of World War I in front of it – and draws blood from his arm into vacuum vials. In the coming week, as he sets about to make his work, Costa empties the contents of the vials onto sheets of Mylar vellum, spreads it out into a pool, places a second sheet of vellum over the substance, presses the two sheets together and then begins the work. But Costa does not pick up an implement and draw, he flattens out his hands and pushes and pulls at the blood caught between the two sheets of vellum. In each piece he will explore the ways in which blood pools or bubbles under the vellum bucklings, or as it dries, the way the blood crystallizes into remarkable capillary patterns that seem to microscopically unravel the mystery of its status as the very thing (along with genes) that carry the lines of connection from father to son, person to person, people to people. At other times, Costa will press and push as to nearly evacuate the center of the work, and pressure the blood down and out to the point of its disintegration in space. He works a single “drawing” for days while the blood still remains fluid and, after he is done with working on these pieces, and the blood has begun to coagulate, Costa will hang them up, and watch them dry – and change, yet remain the same. However he proceeds in his art, Costa nonetheless transposes similar feelings about mortality, identity, and survival in all varieties of his body of work.
Costa’s art is apparently a physical art then: or is it? In just a short period of time, he has turned out a series of “drawings:” all with an apparently uniform appearance. But looked at more closely, one finds different tonalities and temperatures and varying explorations of different elements within the unique art he has undertaken.