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.More recently, I realized that the interventions reflect a type of “ex-voto” painting structure. During the Italian Renaissance Transition in the 15th–16th Century, the tradition of painted narrative ex-votos grew from wealthy patrons who commissioned master painters to create formal, static portraits thanking saints for answered prayers. By the 16th century, these evolved into narrative scenes illustrating a specific crisis. Since then, more traditional ex-votos are dramatic and highly personal, typically featuring three core elements: a depiction of the terrifying event (like a lightning strike, cart crash, or severe illness) or a floating image of the holy figure who intervened, and a handwritten inscription detailing the miracle.

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 and in roiling waters of worldwide 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 responses to current world problems and the complexity of how we live in society and on the earth.

For this reason and prompted by the Pantone System structure combining the ex-voto inspiration , I can illustrate a myriad important issues. For example, the world’s need for generosity, human codes of ethics, and an honorable belief system. To the crisises taking place in everyday life and in the world. ur “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 intervention comments on international or existential concerns and personal codes by using color, image and pattern as “symbol” (a la Pantone). Since 2019, individual ideas are established with explanatory text under each image. The interventions subvert the Pantone Color System while mirroring and a distinct personal or topical issue as one would find in an ex voto painting. 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 a sampling of approximately 200 interventions made since 2019 and installed in public settings nationally and internationally.
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.