Exhibition Challenges the Notion of the Brazilian Outcast

Through his subversion of capitalist and consumerist objects, artist Adriano Costa challenges society’s tendency toward exclusion.

by Andrew Nunes

July 18, 2016, 2:30pm

StorytellingCaipira Installation View, Adriano Costa. All photo courtesy of the artist and Supportico Lopez

Caipira is the Brazilian Portuguese equivalent to a redneck or hick, a pejorative term for a rural individual often assumed to be uneducated, uncultured, and generally ignorant. Unlike redneck, a title some people attempt to wear proudly as a reaction to being labeled, caipira is an exclusionary term that doesn’t band people together, promoting isolation and a sense that you belong to nothing.

Brazilian artist Adriano Costa takes the idea of the caipira as the point of departure for his current solo exhibition at Berlin gallery Supportico Lopez. StorytellingCaipira is a cacophony of enormous hanging drawings, sculptural arrangements of found objects, and bronze calligraphic markings made from coat hangers that feel both primal and sophisticated, rudimentary but intelligently organized, apt metaphors for the misunderstood cultural outsider.

Porn, 2016,Adriano Costa

The most visually condensed and overwhelming piece in the exhibition is OptimisticGardenzzz/GreenJuiceBomb. Upon a patch of artificial grass lies a plethora of mundane tools, consumables, and cultural artifacts, most of them heavily used and disconnected from their original contexts. The sea of scissors, coconuts, bottles, and dozens of hoarded objects blend into one another and become part of a hulking mass, occasionally broken up by pristine and unfitting commercial signifiers like a Uniqlo shopping bag and a luxury Pro Line blender filled with green juice. Here capitalism feels like the ugly social divider that it often is, a mass of useless objects that are consumed in a hope to fit in.

HardOn/TheBelly, 2016, Adriano Costa

The wall works HardOn/TheBelly, PopTitsToTheHitzzz, and Porn use capitalist symbols for purposes devoid of their original function. HardOn/TheBelly brings together a cock ring on a plunger, a vacuum cleaner tube, and splattered make-up as something entirely decorative and non-functional. PopTitsToTheHitzzz is a sculpture of an empty Coca Cola bottle resting on steel-cast seeds of a tree native to Brazil, subverting something natural and full of life into a shelf. An Adidas tracksuit jacket becomes a canvas for the Costa’s discontent with Post-internet art in Porn.

OptimisticGardenzzz/GreenJuiceBomb (detail), 2016, Adriano Costa

“Caipira is me. Caipira is what doesn’t belong to the ‘center’ of the world. It is the banished, the refugees, the non-English speaking. I stay in these places but don’t belong here, because belonging is not allowed to me as my grammar is another, my language is different,” Costa tells The Creators Project. “My piece ThePeople is a huge line of dead flies that says ‘NOT WELCOME’, but I also freed 500 live flies into the gallery. So beware, we [the caipira] are here to stay!”