Eye

Costas Picadas: Merging Nature with Science

By Jonathan Goodman

Costas Picadas, the son of a doctor, was raised in Greece, but he studied art in Paris and eventually made his way to New York, where he now lives and works in Astoria. A mid-career artist, he specializes in two-dimensional works and in videos that address, in wonderful ways, idioms based on nature and science, in particular the grandeur of forests and the cell forms associated with immunology, a branch of medicine he is particularly interested in. The combination is remarkable--there is a genuine sylvan lyricism to the forest pieces, dense with the thin trunks of trees and underbrush, as well as an inspired reading of the cell forms, which are imaginatively painted as part of the compositional language. The cell forms are notable not so much for their faithfulness to scientific reality as for their imaginative reconstruction of form.  Picadas’s density of surface is brought about by a devotion to a lyric reading of nature and science.

His imagery arrives at a realism very close to the actualities that originated the painting. Yet his penchant for a natural verisimilitude is at the same time offset by the very abstract effects he is concerned with, in which different kinds of decorative efflorescences--patterns of curling lines, passages that look like mists, images impossible to conceive of unless the microscope is used as a guide--merge into genuinely large statements of vision.

But where does the vision originate? Picadas is not a medical researcher, although he has been affiliated with research institutes. Instead, he possesses the knowledge of someone raised in a medical family who has gone on to pursue studies in the fields of cellular biology, even though he has not become a professional researcher. Even so, his predilection for such material supports rather than overly complicates his artistic impulse. The paintings he is shown working on in videos are densely covered with non-objective embellishments, which are overlaid as though he were creating a palimpsest. The merger of abstract effects and forms that originate with real science gives Picadas the ability to bridge the gap between the intuitive and the analytical. How many artists can successfully bring this about? Interest between the realism of nature and the realism of science is equally shared in Picadas’ production, which establishes a lyric outlook meant to praise the visible and invisible processes of nature’s forms and processes. This can be done only if the artist pays close attention to the shape of things, focusing on the realities, and also the imaginative visions, he is describing. To the artist’s credit, the integrity of his work is based on a close reading of visual possibilities that occur in the world, as well as an originality that is intuitive and conceived of outside of realism. His fidelity to nature is the source of his strength, but so is his originality.

In contemporary art in America, we have an emphasis on politics and theory. Costas doesn’t deliberately reject these orientations, but he does invest his time in the promulgation of a visual art rather than an one that is overly intellectualized. His presentation of the densities of the natural world, often accompanied by music in his videos, promises a utopia that is increasingly undermined by our destruction of forests. It is rare for someone to so successfully merge a passion for the external world with the microscopic visualizations of cells. At the same time, in at least some of the work, we can point to the informal influence of the New York School, whose all over sense of composition Picadas picks up and makes good use of. But the fact that his true inspirations are science and nature moves him away from later generations of abstract expressionism. Instead, he produces, with considerable success, a language dictated by an intuitive eclecticism; this means he employs whatever is visually useful. Essentially a poet of nature despite living in an urban domain, Picadas makes art that reminds us of our ability to synthesize a composition across a spectrum of influences, not always closely aligned.

Forms of Life
by  Jurriaan Benschop

Is it a romantic notion to assume that art has healing powers, that it could make the world a better place, or the individual a healthier person? These questions come up as I look at the work of Costas Picadas. The artist grew up in a family of doctors in Greece, but he decided to take a different path, attending art school in Paris before moving to his current home base of New York. Picadas mixes an interest in medical science with a personal, experiential study of nature. These elements blend together in his artworks, including in the recent Biomes series, which presents projections of slow-moving images, as well as prints and drawings, all showing natural and abstract motifs.

The projections feel at times like looking through a microscope into the body of a human being or the tissue of a plant. A world of patterns, of tubes and circular forms, appears. All are connected in an ingenuous structure, and in a slow, ongoing movement. Then, mixed with such close ups, a landscape image may emerge, a view we recall from spending time outside: the leaves of a tree shimmering in the sunlight, or a flower opening and closing again. It appears as a stretch of time condensed into ten or twenty seconds. Bringing all of these different perspectives together into one work, with images blending into each other, the artist gives insights into the complex architecture of the world as it surrounds us but is also inside of us. We zoom in on what we cannot see with our bare eyes, and in the work, this is connected to the world as we know it from looking outside.

“I overlay the natural imagery I take from forests with cell imagery from labs, as a way of drawing comparisons between those life forms,” the artist noted. He is fascinated by nature’s potential for regeneration. This also applies to the human body, in the way that cells renew themselves. “I think art can aid the process of regrowth and repair by reminding us of innate natural abilities,” he added. Relating this to the question of the healing power of art, the artist offers a visual reflection on the subject, as if he has written an essay about it in images, not in words. The works are not just aimed at understanding structures, but also at showing connections in and with nature. The real source for healing is located in nature, the work seems to suggest, and yet through artworks, this source can be reflected and brought to the surface. It is significant that in Picadas’ approach, we look not just at humans, but at diverse forms of life. We are simply one among many others.

The artist’s oeuvre comprises different formats and media. While in earlier years his focus was on photography, in recent years the moving-image installations have grown in importance. They might be seen in a gallery on a monitor, or as big projections on the side of a building, or even as a surround installation that covers all of the walls of a space, creating an insular environment. His work aims for an immersive experience in which the goal is not just to analyze an image as an interpretation of the world, but to become part of it, to synchronize with the rhythms as they appear in the works. These pieces are inspired by natural life, by breathing in and out, by the cycle of light during the day, and the change of seasons during the year. Change as it comes to us in these works is change as observed in nature, and as happens all the time both in- and outside of ourselves.

Biomes and Homology in the works of Costas Picadas

By Thalia Vrahopoulos 

The title of this show speaks to Costas Picadas’ use of the biome motif that informs his paintings and videos while examining the underlying similarities in all things. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines biomes as a major ecological community or type of natural organism that adapts as a group. In creating natural forms as seen under a microscope and in nature with the naked eye, Picadas searches for inherent homologies. Like the descent of the human organs in a body, homology is defined by the scientist G.G. Simpson as a “resemblance due to inheritance from a common ancestry.” Homology is often analogized due to a common function so that, for example a wing of a bird is compared with a forearm of a larger animal. However, Picadas’ search for underlying similarities is more than just an examination of Platonic ideal fundamental forms, it is an acknowledgment of the complexity of life.

Picadas through his works wants to heal nature a fact evinced in the use of gauze on his canvasses as a preparatory layer. Having come from a family of doctors Picadas’ salvational tendency is not surprising. But, the use of gauze is not just autobiographical, it is also art historical. Gauze was used with gypsum to prepare wooden panels in Fayum portraits as well as religious Byzantine icons. Gauze also offers protection in the repair of frescos wherein the support bandage is cotton gauze combined with Polyvinyl alcohol. It is usually applied with stucco and provides a light reflective background that imbues greater contrast to colors. This is seen in Picadas’ Biome 6 and Biome 7where the yellow undertones appear to be reflected in the foreground motifs.

Picadas’ Biomes series canvas-panels for the Tenri exhibition range in size from small 23x30” to 73x60 larger pieces. His curved motifs can be read as organic biome forms or biological cells in division and formation as they appear to meet and withdraw. Whereas this phenomenon of coming together and separating in his video projections appears in motion in his painted works the Biomesappear arrested in various phases of this process. Picadas’ use of color is soft, transparent, layered and bounded by curving line while relating to protozoa or biological cells. His scientific subjects arise from his desire to find the inherent connection in life thus, biological aspects like mitosis as inspired by the medical slides, are seen in much of his contemporaneous production both painted and filmed.By  Robert Morgan

From my perspective, I understand this exhibition as one that focuses primarily on the scientific method of investigation from an artistic point of view.  One might say it is a complex exhibition for that reason, but not necessarily so.

In recent years, we have seen a growing interest in exhibitions that seek to bring art and science together. Often in such exhibitions, the emphasis goes more toward the scientific than the artistic, which is contingent on the kind of language necessary to describe the work(s) of the art.  I see the direction of this language as moving towards a kind of specificity and accuracy in a manner less frequently apparent in more traditional artistic media, such as painting, sculpture, and printmaking.

It would appear that Costas Picadas is less interested in traditional media even as his paintings and videos are possibly more advanced in terms of how they are produced and, more significantly, how they deliver the terms the artist aspires to bring to fruition – that being the betrothal between science and nature, often as a personal experience.

Given that Costas was born in Greece to a father who was a medical doctor, his interest in research has played a distinct role in making this betrothal happen. Much of the artist’s work is related to what he views in a microscope suggesting the presence of what are called biomes. These are defined as ecological organisms that eventually adapt to one another as a group along with homologies or resemblances that are due to inheritances found in a common ancestry  (defined by the research scientist, G.G. Simpson). 

In the work of Costas, the overall message behind or within his work is focused less on formal concerns than on the specific role of content, namely the aesthetic connection between science and nature. The point is to bring them closer together in a way that allows the discourse and the sensibility to connect discreetly with one another.

The recent exhibition on view at the Tenri Cultural Institute focuses primarily on the artist’s paintings and drawings in addition to the artist’s videos. In addition, I will mention a series of photographic works that involve portraits that suggest interior human organs. They are identified as singular works, wherein each photograph designates an organ. They are BRAIN, HEART, KNEE,LUNGS, and SPINE. Each of these is surrounded by reeds and wild flowers as if growing from the organ outwards. This is what some viewers might consider a Surrealist manifestation derived from an innate human body.

There are other paintings in a square format, which might be considered drawings, with painted turquoise sections within a field of abstract lines and shapes. These might also reference the body’s interior as seen by rectilinear canvases covered with expressionist-style circles in varied colors referring to activities both within and outside the body. These paintings are the most satisfying works in the show. In each of Costas’ paintings and drawings, there are abstract referents suggesting microscopic information gleaned from a scientific excursion whereby the artist has sought out biomes and homologies through what one writer refers to as the “complex architecture of the world.”

It would be easy to suggest that Costas’ search for meaning between science and nature is a newly discovered search. Here I would include the British poets from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, who discovered that walking through the woods north of London was essential to poetry – that there were limits to writing poetry at one’s desk.

 Even so, Costas Picadas is masterfully important in offering an alternative to the virtual technology that is getting in the way of allowing human beings to be human. As an artist he has taken it upon himself to bring nature back into science, that is, to understand the process of breathing and healing as it requires us to end separations that has prevented our ability to cure who we are and to take a new place in the arbitration of what it means to be human. 

Rhythms In Nature

By Mary Hrbacek 

Tenri Cultural Institute Presents Biomes and Homologies: Costas Picadas, an exhibition of large-scale multi-media works on canvas and smaller 3D model, photo-based prints on paper, curated by Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos. Picadas has created a stunning experimental group of hybrid visual artworks on canvas that blurs the boundaries between painting and drawing-based mixed media process art, making these works indefinable. His compelling daring innovations are unique. He blends the concept of painting, which is invoked by his use of canvas on wooden stretcher bar supports, with the reality of drawing by employing graphic materials such as oil pastels, charcoal and also acrylic.

Picadas is inspired by cells he carefully observes through a microscope, and by large plant forms that grow in outlying areas such as forests. He stresses the likenesses of the natural form he discovers, in order to comprehend their formations more clearly. In the fields of Chemistry and Biology, the dictionary definition of "homology" is "the state of having the same or similar relations, relative position, or structure. “Biome" defines a group or community of animal and plant life that coexist in the same habitat.

These abstract works are populated with multiple groups of ovals that have morphed into a rhythmic language with a quick pulse and throbbing tempo. The pictures are visual counterparts to musical compositions, with harmonies of various repeated beats and movements that draw viewer attention into the realms of muted gold, black and grey organisms. The cells seem to float upward, presumably toward the light. In several pieces the surface is laid over with wide masking tape which establishes richness through layers of "real" material that suggests an elusive unfathomable sense of time. Some of the white circular shapes that dominate several compositions may appear to be in progress. Sometimes the lines in the "Biomes" are loosely overlapped, with stress on the physicality of the materials; in other incidences the lines are drawn in relatively sensitive outlines around the circular forms of burgeoning cells. In a group of gleaming, 3-D Model photo-based print works there are hyper-real gold toned organs interspersed with delicate twigs that sprout small green leaves. The prints, entitled "Knee," "Heart," "Brain" and "Lungs," display an extreme realism that features golden disembodied organs set on a pure white paper ground that sparkle as if alive.

The artist comes from a family of doctors and practitioners who brought their medical knowledge into the home while he was growing up. Picadas applies transparent gauze over some areas of his large formats, symbolically representing the healing process of nature, as a doctor would do to protect a serious recovering wound. Transforming the infinitesimal cellular forms into the macroscopic visual formats allows Picadas to explore deeper relationships, to discover their underlying links that spark meaning and significance. He seems to have a compelling need to explore the intricacies of the cell forms and their variants, in mostly monochromatic compositions that stress color harmonies and neutral tones, especially grey and white. His work accentuates drawing, especially flowing stem-like shoots that stretch and flow among and between the circular shapes they surround. In Biome 3, the subtleties of charcoal establish visual interest where the fine details intermingle in the atmospheric interstices that connect the larger forms and shapes.

Picadas draws beautifully; he has brought this skill to a format that is traditionally used for paintings on canvas. There is an experimental component to Picadas’ use of unusual medias in an unconventional format; oil pastels are delicate, but also accessible, which makes them a practicable choice for a direct approach to picture making. The artist has a tremendous affinity for shapes; he creates his homologies and biomes with honesty and emotion, with a commitment to transmitting the configurations of forms he finds under the microscope. He makes discernible changes and corrections that bring the images in the works closer to their true realities instilled with an almost perceptible feeling of movement and flux. Some of his shapes are inspired by the mitosis of cells in which a cell splits into two daughter cells with the same number of chromosomes.

Picadas considers art to be a powerful source of regeneration and sustenance that sparks our curiosity and appreciation for its beauty and complexity. Through links to our source in nature it serves as a reinvigorating element that nurtures the crucial human need for emotional expression. In contemporary global society dominated by technology we are increasingly cut off from a vital link with our organic roots. The artist has used various means to regain this interconnection; he has explored videos with monitors in gallery settings and projections on large buildings to achieve immersive environments. Picadas is convinced that as an artist he not only analyzes the underpinnings of nature, but in so doing he becomes one with its rhythms in his works. 

The art of Costas Picadas is equally persuasive in terms of its exemplary concept and course of development. Over the years, he has become a multi-media artist who works as decisively with painting as he does with photography and video.  The major aspect of the latter works focuses on digital prints in which photographs of human anatomy are based on 3-D models. Here the artist is particularly involved with showing cellular life both in microcosmic detail and macrocosmic form. From another more tactile perspective, his paintings function in terms of expressionist detail whereby they might re-appear as intense gestural markings. The enlarged dimensions of Picadas’ recent paintings inform viewers of a revelatory painterly content in which the cellular content on the surface reveals a heightened, though understated expressivity.

Picadas’ concept of cellular life is generally true in his videos as well. These works add time to his images as shown in tapes featuring visual multiplications of cells that include delicately webbed images combining human and natural environments. Seen in this context, the paintings shown at Donopoulos International Fine Arts in New York, focus both on small and large-scale paintings. Herein the dimensions of his work focus on the initial creativity, the growth, and the delimitation of cells either within or superimposed from one painting to another.  In either case, it is a matter of how we compare human and plant anatomy as being organic forms giving way to what is called horizontal rectilinear elements that include respondent tones of green, turquoise, and pink, among other prints of human organs.

Picadas’ focus on the universe and meta-verse might also recall aspects of the everyday world jointly matched, thus giving a rise to borderline tendencies that play a major role in terms of how we think, see, feel, perform, and communicate on a regular, routine basis. It is within this context that such works as Picadas’ Paintings 1-5 (2023) include the mental stamina to overcome the refusal to separate the equalization of universal and meta-versal modes in Picadas’ discourse.

Even so, the question is raised as to whether a fixed methodology might be of any use in determining which direction this interpretation might go – if, in fact, there is a necessity to do so. For the most part, discursive elements in Picadas’ paintings are somewhat less than relevant.

To elaborate is to suggest that the cellular structures being revealed by Picadas require both angles, not just one. Parameters, such as universe and metaverse, appear to function precisely in the context of anatomical life-giving organs as well as horticultural plants.

Herein Picadas’ paintings are open to interpretation at either end of the spectrum. Both organs and plants are equal on the video screen. Symbolically, the two combine to create a message of their own. Again, we asked to observe the universe and meta-verse within the context of what direction is being given and in what manner the message is being passed along. Not everything can be read from a fictitious point of view. Consequently, the overview is in the balance as to how the content of universe and meta-verse are revealed in relation to one another.

The legacy of Picadas is not difficult to discern. Fundamentally, it argues in favor of giving our attention to reading the structure of the universe in relation to that of the meta-verse, each in the context of a holistic phenomenon. An obvious example would be seeing art not only aesthetically, but in connection to scientific experience possibly in relation to mathematical form. It would appear the artist is interested in working not only from the angle of separatism, but in direct relation to how these elements come to a focus during the course of everyday life.