Metamagico

PAV Parco Arte Vivente in Turin, in collaboration with Archivio Claudio Costa and C+N Gallery CANEPANERI, presents a major solo exhibition dedicated to Claudio Costa, one of the most singular and least explored artists of the Italian late twentieth century.
“Metamagico”, curated by Marco Scotini, explores Costa’s central body of work from the 1970s, revolving around his founding obsession: the relationship between material culture, biological memory, and anthropological origins. The exhibition follows a path that revisits the archive, the museum, and the ritual as sites where this relationship manifests.
The exhibition is part of PAV’s historical research program dedicated to the roots of the relationship between art and the ecosystem – a direction it has cultivated since its foundation but which, in recent years, it has sought to extend to those pioneers who, as early as the 1960s and 1970s, anticipated the questions now central to the debate on ecology, biodiversity, and the memory of the living. Within this framework, Claudio Costa occupies a unique position: he does not represent nature; he uses it as an archive, as a system of signs, as material that carries within itself the traces of biological and cultural time, convinced that the natural past is not lost but always latent, capable of being exhumed through the artistic gesture.
Claudio Costa trained between Milan and Paris, where he attended S.W. Hayter’s famous graphic workshop, Atelier 17, and met Marcel Duchamp, who would remain an essential reference for him. From the late 1960s, moving in contact with the experience of Arte Povera without ever fully absorbing its coordinates, his research developed in an autonomous and radical direction: that of a visual anthropology blending tools from ethnography, palaeontology, and alchemy into what he defined as “Work in Regress.” This concept, a play on James Joyce, served as his primary inspiration: a journey always in the making, but moving backwards toward the origin of humanity. Costa is not an artist who speaks “about” primitive culture, but rather one who adopts its method: collecting, classifying, burying, exhuming, and transforming.