In 1960 Toni Costa became a member of the artists’ association Gruppo N that had been founded the year before in Padua, and which also included Alberto Biasi, Ennio Chiggio, Edoardo Landi, and Manfredo Massironi. In changing constellations, its representatives championed experimental strategies that sought to further the merging of the genres of painting and sculpture, using modern industrial materials à la Op Art and Kinetic Art. The works they made in the early sixties were largely the outcome of joint collaborations that aimed at conveying neither the craftsmanship and technology that went into their manufacture, nor the personal signature of an individual artist.

Picking up on the concepts of geometrical abstraction and Constructivism from the twenties and thirties, Toni Costa began in 1961 to produce a series of works under the title Dinamica visuale in which numerous slender strips of PVC were mounted in various configurations inside wooden frames. Works from this sequence were first shown in 1961 at the trail-blazing exhibition Nove Tendencije [Nouvelles Tendances], Zagreb. The eponymous international artists movement that evolved from this included not only the Italian representatives of Gruppo N and Gruppo T, but also numerous members of other artists’ associations, such as ZERO and Effekt (Germany), GRAV (France), and Exat 51 (Yugoslavia). Toni Costa’s approach, in which he undertook an exact investigation of object and space, as well as surface and structure, was closely related to the strategies his fellow artists employed at the time.

Depending on the angle from which the observer is looking, the colour gradient and the effect of light and shade in Toni Costa’s Alternazione undergo constant change. As a result of the way the pale, high-gloss PVC ribbons have been stretched over the diamond shaped black support with a twist, on the one side in a clockwise direction, on the other in the opposite direction, the slat-like surface opens up in increasing amplitudes to form two opposing waves of motion. Almost impossible to grasp visually, an involuntary, scintillating effect sets up that recalls the flickering of electronically produced monitor images.

Toni Costa

1935 born in Padua

2013 died in Padua