Forms of Life

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’s 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.

- Jurriaan Benschop

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.

ROBERT C.MORGAN

Costas Picadas: Merging Nature with Science

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’s production, which establishes a lyric outlookmeant 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 allover 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.

Jonathan Goodman

Rhythms In Nature

Mary Hrbacek on May 17, 2023 -

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 gray 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 gray 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's 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 discernable 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 the its rhythms in his works.

  MARY HRSBACKEK

NIIO ART

Costas Picadas is an artist who currently lives and works in New York. Picadas studied fine arts and art history at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Louvre School in Paris, and has exhibited his works internationally at biennales, festivals, and galleries in Athens, Paris, Avignon, Amsterdam, and New York. Picadas’ works and art practice come from an awareness that we share a deep essence which is encoded in all organisms. Just like the mycelial networks hold the soil, the plants, and the trees together, humans share a practice of respiration which in the artist’s words allows us to stay grounded on this planet.Niio Art recently published Picadas’ new solo show titled World Inside Us composed of works from his Microbiomes. We sat down with Costas to discuss this latest project and his motivations to affect his viewers with this series.

1. Can you elaborate on the different technological tools used in the creation of your artworks? What is the balance that you use between found imagery and live documentation?

   I work with many different techniques, I work with photography, painting, and drawing. I use new technologies like After Effects and augmented reality, and I am still investigating new technologies. But these are only tools, the essence of goal is in my concept. It’s important for me to have a very structured idea, and the tools are there in the service of my idea. The same goes for found imagery as opposed to images that I create. A good example is my inspiration from science. A few years ago, I was invited to give a lecture at the immunology department of Mount Sinai hospital where I expressed my interest in healing and met some very interesting scientists. They were kind enough to give me some medical slides of microscopic images with which I could recreate images combining nature and medical science. Through my concept I aim to blend images of nature with those of human biology in order to ascertain the existing underlying similarities in both ecosystems.
   2.              Your artworks show a deep understanding and interest in the study of nature. Can you please explain how this came about in your art practice?

Since I was a kid I was living the life of a saint and religion, I was intrigued by how these people become phenomena in healing themselves and other people. I was questioning how this is possible? Then I started to understand how ecosystems, like forests for example are completely autonomous and know how to heal themselves, reproduce themselves, and regenerate themselves which is the cycle of nature. We see the four seasons, we see the beginning, the end, the cycles. We have the human body that is born and dies. But nature regenerates itself in cycles, and I was fascinated by that. While walking one day I heard whispers from a tree, and I became interested in how an ecosystem knows how to live, die, and regenerate. The idea of how a given ecosystem can have these powers inspired the investigation in my own work.  Moreover, I was curious about how art as part of human expression could possess this healing process, and how this aspect could possibly be transferred to our own bodies.  

3.              Your new series of works Biomes may remind some of paintings by artist Georgia O’Keeffe where we find a tension between abstraction and depictions of the natural world. Is it right to read your works in this way and how would you place your artistic practice within the trajectory of art history?

My new works Biomes are inspired by the seven Biomes that exist on our planet. One biome for example is the ecosystem of the forest, the second is the desert, third is the coral reef. In my works you will see many representations of coral branches breathing inside of their own ecosystem.

Of course, my works do have a fleeting connection to the images of Georgia O’Keeffe as well as other artists working with abstracted imagery. Every artist has a uniqueness but at the same time we are all connected. We may even be investigating the same things but we express them in different ways. We are all human beings expressing ourselves with the tools that we have as people. We express things with the tools that we have as human beings, but we use these tools in different ways. We investigate who we are and what life is. In human history we started expressing ourselves, eons ago. Art history demonstrates the uniqueness of what we have created. I don’t create art to become the history of art, I create art because I am interested in human nature and human life. You need centuries to define what has become important, you need distance from it. It’s all about consciousness. Technology changes now more than ever. We have the accumulation of knowledge. Artists of my era and I use what is new. 500 years from now, my work is going to be understood in terms of a cave painting. It’s something that we cannot even imagine. To say that my art will be part of art history we will need to see it from a distance.

4.              Can you please dive deeper into your interest in the analogies of the human body and natural forms found in our outside surroundings?

Whatever exists in the universe is one energy, it’s the same energy. We investigate what we see on this planet. This planet started creating microorganisms and developed this nature. Only after many eons did humans come to this planet. Everything is connected in this same energy. Like you see in the forest, the whole forest is connected through fungi, through the mycorrhizal network, which is similar to what happens in the human brain. This energy represents very similar forms such as a tree, a human being, an animal. All the forms that we see are very similar to the brain and the human body because it’s the same energy and the same forms. 

What I am trying to achieve with my works is to emphasize this consciousness that we are very similar and connected. People living in big cities, multiply. The human population doubled in the last forty years. Seventy percent of the population is suffering from depression. People get sick, there is no room in hospitals, and there are not enough doctors so what is the point. We have to understand our nature and our connection to nature. Why is the forest not depressed? Because it knows how to heal itself. As human beings we forget that we have the most developed brain and we forget how to deal with these things so we just get sick. I try to create comfort zones where people can see images of the human body and of nature and become more conscious of their own healing abilities.

5.              As an artist who has worked with many different mediums from painting to photography to video art could you please provide your assessment of the digital arts and its potential to discuss complex subject matters and to reach wider audiences?

 I think people are more and more interested in seeing a moving image, they like that experience and simulation. Technology is still relatively new, so people might think ‘oh this is not art’ but this is the same thing people said about photography years ago. I think people are more sensitive to the way we live today we think that we don’t have time to do many things. So, the more direct the message, the better it captures the attention of the public. Therefore, for me technology is a great tool. It’s an important tool. It’s very direct and captures people’s attention.

  - Roxanne Vardi

Biomes and Homology in the works of Costas Picadas

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.

-Thalia Vrahopoulos

‍ ‍

Counterpoint: The Clarity of Costas Picadas

by Donald Brackett                                                                                                   

     The magic lantern we know as the camera first delivered a shockingly real reproduction of reality as early as 1827 by the French artist Joseph Niepce. Over almost two centuries, its startling conveyor belt of aesthetic growth (from glass to tin plates to paper prints) continued apace to include depictions of actual movement in cinema, then the cathode screen and eventually today’s digital computer terminal. Enter Picadas.

     Welcome to the future history of photography: a utopia of pure images, a somewhat surreal realm in which our presumed yet arbitrary borderlines between the real and the imagined are deftly erased by the aesthetic prowess and technical skill of the artist. These splendidly pale gems are chromogenic prints, colloquially known as c-prints, but they are digital c-prints, where the image content is exposed through lasers rather than chemicals. Created in limited editions of five, with variable scales, and face-mounted to plexiglass, they are also invitations to a fresh kind of visual experience, one consisting of crystal clear clarity.

     What Arbus did for faces and figures, the Greek-born and New York-based Picadas seems to do for places and buildings: he reveals their inner essence by rubbing gently on their surface qualities to unearth from beneath their architectural facades either their secret countenance or their psychic landscape. His dream-like vistas, with portions either fading into or out of diffused optical focus, offer the viewer a whole new and vastly expansive dimension of hidden significance. They are retinal balms that soothe the weary eyes of our digital age, and yet they too are also digital gifts, pulling us into the otherworldly architectonic realm of the everyday world we inhabit.

     Picadas, who grew up in Athens before studying in Paris and eventually gravitating to the ultimate conceptual country of America, has wholeheartedly embraced the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, to update Walter Benjamin’s fine study of the visual aura. He masterfully uses technology, including photoshop techniques, to push photography towards its next frontier: the photograph as a seductive phantom in a meticulously designed zone of precisely calibrated ethereal visions. The subtle power of their visual charms is often quite breathtaking: they evoke the very core phenomenology of photography itself.

     The three principal bodies of work presented here, the Aether, Hyperbola and Voids series respectively, all beckon us into a totally familiar and yet utterly alien nexus of humanly inhabited netherhoods. They explore a domain reconstructed from the raw materials of our world yet transmuted through the artist’s imagination into new world, one at once inviting and forbidding in its austere elegance. He unveils a sequence of mysteriously lux-collaged urban landscapes whose inhabitants seem to have abandoned their dwelling places and vanished into time.

     His oneiric (from the original Greek word for dream) vistas provide literal expression of the original meaning of the word photo-graphis: writing or drawing with light, in this case, with hyper-precise laser light. These three bodies of work are veritable celebrations of clarity itself as content. Being what I might call an imagineer, an engineer of images, his aesthetic agenda is a very straightforward one: “I like to create emotions in the viewer, which are then followed by their asking of certain questions. While considering these questions, the viewer can experience a kind of stopping of time: it is when time stops that magic starts, and with it, the open opportunity for enlightenment begins.”

Aether, a classical element in Greek mythology, was thought to be a material filling the lofty regions of the universe above the terrestrial sphere, an upper sky which also filled every speck of matter in both space and throughout time. It personifies the universal substance. The great thing about enlightenment is the fact that it can also often be so damn entertaining, as in the calm splendour of “Aether 3” and “Aether 6” for instance, with their mysterious dolmen-like stone and ghostly shed with no entrance. These are liminal, or threshold experiences par excellence.

     Hyperbola, in classical mathematics, is a type of smooth curve lying in a plane and is one of three kinds of conic sections formed by the intersection of a plane and a cone. The original Greek word means over-thrown or excessive, as in extremis or at the very limit of potential encounter. “Hyperbola 3” and “Hyperbola 11” each register a cool-headed variety of extremity however, with their box-like structures confounding the concept of interior or exterior and also offering up a perplexing riddle of reflections.

Voids, especially the cosmic kind, are vast spaces between filaments which contain very few or no galaxies, and as such they have come to be associated with vacuums or emptiness and space without matter. Far from actually being empty however, they form the supporting basis for which anything at all can ever exists. As such, his “Voids 11” and “Voids 4”, throb with the paradox of offering more than one void: a tree, rock and wall interacting with their surroundings and baked by a sunlight so intense it scorches our vision. Likewise “Voids 6” and Voids 1” also create a theatrical stage set feeling where a recurring character in his works, “the wall”, is an actor in a dramatic monologue for silent stone voices.

     For Roland Barthes, each photograph was a veritable “certificate of presence”, one which embodies time in a spatial manner. Equally true of Picadas is the mesmerizing fact of being a document of absence, in which any trace of habitation is willfully withheld. I suspect this is because we ourselves, as the viewers, are the only dwellers in this serene and spooky reverie-soaked domain. Besides, all the potential human dwellers of these agora-like spaces appear to have collected together all at once into one spectacularly funneled crowd scene in the figure-filled “Hyperbola 2”.

     The stillness in these exquisite images makes it difficult for me not to be reminded of the poet Goethe’s charming definition, that music is liquid architecture and architecture is frozen music. This artist appears to be exploring what is known as the architectural uncanny, structures both very familiar yet alien, witnessed as in a waking swoon using the polysensorialgaze: a visual experience that stimulates both the senses and the intellect simultaneously. Thus, his photographs feel to me like melting timescapes, since they so clearly examine what Bachelard called the poetics of space.

    These three principal bodies of work also convey to us the allure of three other ancient Greek concepts: Apeiron: that which is limitless, boundless, indefinite, and without boundary; Aletheia: a personification of the unconcealed, a symbol of disclosure and truth; and Kairos: meaning the right, critical and opportune moment, there being two words for time, chronos (sequential time) and kairos (the right time for action).

    Picadas images are all about the poised magic of kairos, perhaps especially the boldly quiet interlopers in this curated selection, the sudden bursts of colour contained in two pieces referencing Tachyons, hypothetical particles that move faster than light and contravene the known laws of physics, and Quarks, a type of elementary particle making up the constituency of all matter everywhere. 

     Thus “Tachyon 13” and “Quark Tunneling 14” both bring us back by circuitous navigation to the realm of the optical unconscious: a subtle place where painting first intersects with technology, and they do indeed resemble theatrical painterly excursions into an alternate reality. As I see it, his primary artistic interest is how to bridge the gap between inner and outer reality by reestablishing the dynamic equilibrium that governs their relationships.

     As he himself puts it so very well, “In my photographs I examine and reveal the ways in which one can freezeboth space and time by re-contextualizing different parts of reality and recombining them in new ways. The result is that both objects, and even situations, can be transformed into a kind of sculpture, providing us access to new knowledge about the nature of our reality.”

     In keeping with that basic photographic tenet but also uniquely distinguished from it, in the case of Costas Picadas, his photographs are still secrets about a secret, except the less they show us, the more we know.

                                                                                                                          -  Donald Brackett

BIO

Costas Picadas was born in Ioannina Greece. He studied art at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts and art history at the Louvre School in Paris. Picadas’ work has been exhibited, among other places, at Queens Museum- Bulova NY, Paris Kohn Gallery NY, Denise Bibro Gallery NY, The Blender Gallery Athens Greece,Donopoulos Gallery GR, Gallery Gransart Paris, Mykonos Biennale Greece, The Young Art Fair in Switzerland, Gallery J&J Donguy Paris, Some Young New Yorkers III at PS1 NY, Kappatos Gallery, Athens, Greece, Gallery de Buci Paris, Gallery Anatole Chartres, France, Gallery de Nest Paris, Salon de Montrouge, Paris, W.G. Amsterdam, Holland, and the Festival of Avignon, France. Articles, reviews and critical analysis of Picadas’ work appear in solo and group show catalogues in addition to newspapers and magazines in France, Greece and New York, such as Zing Magazine, Absolute Arts, New York Spaces, White hot, Flash Art and more . Since 1994 he has been living and working in New York City.

1966           Born in Ioannina Greece

1986-1990  Studied at the Division of Contemporary Arts at the Ecole du Louvre of Paris 

1986-1990  Studied at Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris

Currently living and working in New York

Selection of group and solo Exhibitions:

2026

Hippocratic Medical Symposium -Rubin s museum NY

Venous symposium-Sheraton NY

2025

William Morisson Gallery-Kent CT

Henry Dunant Hospital -Athens Greece

Art wow now- New Zealand

Artlume-UK

Day Dream- Berkshire Botanical Garden MA

Baltoyannis Clinic- Ioannina Greece

St Jude Ronald Mcdonald House- NY

2024

The Opening Gallery -NY

York Gallery -Aesthetica-London UK

Santorini M museum-GR

2023

SEDITIONS ART-new NFT launch -UK

NIIO art -NFT launch -US

The opening gallery -NY

TENRI cultural Institute-NY

Art on Paper -AR booth-NY

Paris kohn Gallery-NY

GIAFF -Limlip museum Seoul-Korea

Equinox AR -Zagreb Croatia

UIAF art fair Ulsan-Korea

Donopoulos gallery-NY

Iconica Fine Art-Digital show on Artsy

2022

SEDITIONS ART-England

Frequency mind -NY

Donopoulos Gallery-Greece

Back to Athens-International art festival-Athens Greece

FADA-Festival arts design-Acerenza Italy

CADAF NY-@WEB 3 Gallery NY

Art on Paper -Art fare -NY

Theofano Foundation prize-Greece

SIHAF art fare-Seoul Korea

Equinox-Public installation AR-Zagreb Croatia

Paris Kohn Gallery-NY

2021

Kreemart project-Pardon me-NY

Ornare -NY-Southamptons

Aesthetica magazine Symposium-UK

SNARK ART-First drop

CADAF- Crypto Art fair-NY

NAIA-Southampton-NY

NUSHAMA-NY video projections-NY

2020

GIANNY-installation-Lecture- NY

Roadmaps Festival-Artist in Residence on line-3 Events-NY

CADAF Digital Art fare-NY

KTBE Theater on Aristophanous Birds -Greece

NAIA at Capri-Southamptons-NY

TED -X Vail-TED talks -COUNTDOWN-VAIL-USA

2019

Prism 2019-Lenfest Center for the Arts-NY

ARTLOFT -Berlin -Germany

Lytehouse-VIdeo installation -NY

ON CANAL 318 gallery-Video installation -NY

Mykonos Biennial 2019-Greece

Dreamideamachine Gallery-Greece

inside Out and Beyond Greek Embassy -NY

2018

Anya and Andrew Shiva gallery -NY

Odon Wagner gallery –Toronto Canada

Mise en scene gallery -CT USA

Toronto Art fair-ART TO-Canada

2017

Gallery Paris Koh NY

Mykonos Biennial 2017-Greece

2015
The Blender Gallery, Athens, Greece
Voce Di, New York

2013
Mykonos Biennale-Greece
Ithaka Art Festival "Ithaka Returned" -Greece

Museum of Modern art-Crete Rethymnon-Greece

2003
Denise Bibro Gallery ,New York

Gallery LS-Crete Greece

2002

Budman Gallery - New York

2000
Queens Museum-BULOVA- New York

Gallery Michael Lombardi , New York

1999
The Young Art Fair , Basel, Switzerland
Gallery J&J Donguy , Paris
Criss Cross: Some Young New Yorkers III At P.S.1 , New York
Kappatos Gallery , Athens Greece

1995
Graphic Arts Fair At Waldorf Astoria , New York
Galerie Anatole , Chartre, France
Galerie De Buci , Paris
Salon De Mai , Paris

1994
Salon De Montrouge , Montrouge, France

La Ruée Vers L'Eure At Chartres, France
Ex-Voto At St. Romain Space Of New York

1993
Galerie De Nestle Of Paris France
Mini Print Slovenia At The International Exhibition , Slovenia
Novembre A Vitry Of Vitry-Sur-Seine, France
Itineraire At Levallois-Peret, France
Amsterdam W.G. , Amsterdam Holland
Biennal De Peinture , Issey-Les-Moulineaux, France
Hospital Saint Louis , Paris France
Galerie Gransart , Paris france

1992
SPADEM - Associates Des Arts Plastiques , Paris
Espace Michael Simon Of Noisy-Le-Grande, France
Hotel Imperial Of Annecy, France

Galerie Gransart of Paris
New Medical Center of Orleans, France
Musée du Grand Orient de France of Paris

1991
Galerie De Nestle , Paris France
Exposition Internationale D'Arts Plastiques - Palais Des Arts , Nice, France
Festival D'Avignon, Avignon France
Institute Espagnol De Paris, Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France

1990
Galerie de Nestle , Paris, France
International Art Competition, New York

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