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Alexander Costello works with a wide range of materials, approaches
and techniques both as a solo artist and in his numerous collaborative
projects, For the exhibition at T1+2 Costello produced a series
of large-scale site-specific paintings concerning themes such
as linguistic ambiguity, escape, and the brusque contingencies
of everyday life. Borrowing his imagery from Italian comic books,
the artist has added to each of these vignettes - of speeding
cars, women, cowboy punch-ups and ejector seats - two texts. Bluntly
tautological or plainly idiotic, these appended snatches of language
critically disrupt the visual images' "obvious" meanings,
reframing them whilst being themselves affected by the highly
stylised pictures over which they are placed. The resulting juxtapositions
of text and image generate a complicated play of linguistic and
visual signs, a volatile interchange which is by turns puzzling,
interrogative, comical and melancholic.
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