Artist Aidan Costello's plexiglass paintings aim to communicate concepts artistically. See these amazing works on display at the next RAW San Diego showcase on Thursday, October 28th at the Se Hotel in Downtown. 

Much of my art is striving to achieve a balance between being retinal and cerebral. I feel the pendulum of art making has swung too far towards the cerebral and too many interesting ideas are lost because the visual quality of much work is severely lacking.

To those ends there are three mediums I am currently focused on. The main mediums I use are Collage and paintpen drawings on clear plexiglass. I also make oil paintings on canvas.

The collages have evolved slowly over the last several years and are composed of pieces of photographs cut out of high end fashion magazines. With the collages I create a narrative of figurative landscapes; the arms, legs, and torsos become ‘architectural flesh’ and create organic compositions using physical elements. When viewed from a distance they’re abstract but upon closer inspection reveal their figurative origins. Much of the time, sometimes unconsciously, I create visual puns and double images, reminiscent of Dali’s ‘critical paranoiac’ method of visualization. In the end a narrative is employed and the pieces retain the aura of a photo album or short story. It is also important to mention there are no faces on the figures in the collages. There are a variety of reasons for this, the primary being to extract any identity from the figure outside of the physicality.

The plexiglass drawings are an extension of the collages. They operate on a similar conceptual level. The main differences are visual, the figures have been reduced to nothing more than intersecting lines on a clear background. By removing most of the original information from the source material, the narrative of the pieces becomes clearer. Also the visual effect is quite different for the viewer. Since the emphasis resides in the overlap of the different figures and elements; the eye begins following one line and ends up seeing a different figure altogether among the patterns and fields of linework. 

Aidan graduated from the School of Visual Arts (NYC) in 2002 and lived in Brooklyn until 2006. He currently lives and works in San Diego.