COSTA Lot n° 9

Rally in France, 2023 Enamelled plates and welded steel sheets Born in 1970 in Sarlat, in the heart of the Périgord Noir area, Fernando Costa developed a creative spirit from an early age, inventing things from everyday objects. When he was a teenager, he came across the sculptor César Baldaccini during a news report. It was a revelation: the desire to be an artist never left him. It was then during a trip to the United States, when he saw a table made from a speed limit sign, that the idea of using road signs germinated. Second revelation: he had discovered HIS material. COSTA, who was working in the hotel business at the time, learnt to weld from an ironmonger, and obtained authorisation from the Ministry of Public Works to criss-cross France to collect the famous road signs from the Departmental Public Works and their suppliers, which were already telling endless stories in the artist’s head. He then took a chance and produced his first creations at the end of the 1990s. Denouncing waste, he cuts up old road signs destined for the scrap heap, giving them a poetic second life in abstract or narrative compositions that reveal the artist’s moods, his search for colour, or the complex pictorial discourse he develops around themes or figures that are dear to him. A simple and generous artist, COSTA presents an art brut in which spontaneity has pride of place. With COSTA, interpretation remains free, there is not only “One Way”...