CHRIS COSTAN

selected rogue interventions: an ongoing, public project

At my day job as a Color Designer/Trend Specialist for a fashion brand, the color palette was a serious affair. I analyzed how/why people were wearing types of clothing/styles and particular colors at any given moment. I was an informed “spinner” of tales on trending colors for the benefit of merchandisers, designers, sales accounts, and the sales associates found in the retail stores. Using the Pantone Color System (the standardized color matching method, used commercially and internationally) aided me in the job of giving my colleagues a sense of why I was recommending one color over another during a particular season.

For me as a visual artist, the drive to make art always involved irony/complexity, humor, absurdity and visual delight, and it still does. But in the past 10 years, many of us have found ourselves in a state of more urgency or, the roiling waters of discord. The increased existential nature of days has brought me to reflect on current conditions in a segment of my work. I needed to find a way to also express my distress at current world problems and the complexity of how we live in society and on the earth.

For this reason, I have been using the Pantone System which was a necessary part of my day job. With the unsanctionedinterventions below, I take the whimsy, practicality and the commerciality out of the Pantone System applying its structure to illustrate important issues. For example, the world’s need for generosity, human codes of ethics, and an honorable belief system. In addition, our “house”, the earth, is on fire, with the natural world in utter decline.

In one intervention, I contradict Ernest Hemingway’s vision of bullfighting in which the practice of cruelty towards earthly living creatures is used for the entertainment of people. In another case, with Continental Drift, I look at the nature of the land which changes constantly, however slowly. In other interventions, I allude to the conquering of nations or the story of Moby Dick, exemplifying the creativity of humans (the creator, Herman Melville), mixes with the human trait of vengeance (in Captain Ahab).

Each of the interventions comments on international or existential concerns and personal codes by using color, image and pattern as “symbol” (a la Pantone). Since 2019 while using this Pantone format, each idea is established with explanatory text under the image. Each piece mimics but subverts the Pantone Color System with a distinct personal or topical issue. The different works shift from the emotional to the political…to the realm of the art idea. Each narrative creates a record of my viewpoints. The “project” becomes a collection of thoughts in the style of a diary, however, a potential way to expose the diary in public spaces.

Below is just a sampling of approximately 200 interventions made and installed in public settings nationally and internationally, since 2019.

Materials are varied including; gesso, acrylic paint, oil stick, novelty paillettes, ink, stickers. gold leaf, sequined braid, gold braid, the artist’s hair, dog hair, vinyl, hand printed montage/collage, sewing notions and ink on acid-free paper

Click any image below to learn more about individual interventions pictured.