Antonio E. Costa is truly an international artist and citizen. Born in 1942, Costa was a member of the third generation of a family of artists and writers who had moved from Goa to Africa. Although most of his childhood was spent in his birthplace, Ethiopia, Costa was educated primarily in Canada, graduating in fine arts from the University of Calgary there, and going on to obtain a Masters degree in Environmental Studies at the University of York in the same country. Apart from these early travels, the artist also journeyed and drew experiences in countries like Zimbabwe, Spain, Brazil and Angola before finally settling in Bangalore to paint, exhibit and occasionally deliver guest lectures at art faculties.
It is no wonder then that Antonio E Costa’s work bears the very strong imprint of his experiences with the several diverse cultures that shaped him and even those he became familiar with whilst traveling through them. The many landscapes he saw and remembers, from dry, hot Ethiopia to verdant and Amazonian Brazil, play very important roles in his painting and new age sculpture, as do the textures he felt there. In his paintings we see how well he marries form and texture with already existing shapes and images. This technique can also be attributed to the fact that Costa had made inroads in the field of experimental architectural and urban design earlier in his career.
Best known for his large mixed media abstracts, Antonio E Costa believes in melding all his experiences to give rise to art that speaks to every viewer. Whether using materials symbolic of rural and urban, or chaste and polluted, Costa is always cross-referencing his media to create what can be called ‘the whole picture’, connecting elements that are poles apart from each other. He has used materials like different woods from various countries, metal, plexi glass and handmade paper and surfaces like pre-painted canvases and pine boards to create these works.
Costa also firmly considers that change is the only constant in life and that although ‘the whole picture’ will remain intact, there is always a give and take mechanism operating between its elements.
