"Jorge Costa's intricate, miniature cultural icons executed with the draftsman-like quality of a Dürer, stud and embed the overall painting with their graphite presence, conjuring alarm, delight, surprise, and shock, individually, and as composites within the larger pictures, living in the western world. A depiction of the Lincoln Memorial sports a satellite dish and Mickey Mouse ears; a gas mask or the Pope, might save us from oil fumes, chemical spillages and pollution, but from ourselves? What could enliven us to what Western culture’s swill of vacant images, consumerism, and earth’s degradation did and does to each of us, to this artist, in our daily lives? Costa’s work enlivens. It helps us look at the road ahead, the one we’re on, get back on the tightrope and inch ourselves eventually upright until we can see the bigger picture, the wreckage we cause. Oil is a major player in some of these pieces; that’s clear. But Costa paints and draws fragility into these slow-motion spoofs of a world in collapse."
Donna Fleischer
Untitled, Graphite on Paper, 40" x 28", 2007 - 2012
Untitled, Graphite and on Paper, 40” x 28”, 2007 - 2013
Untitled, Graphite on Paper, 40” x 28”, 2007 - 2013
Untitled, Graphite on Paper, 40” x 28”, 2007 - 2013
Untitled, Graphite and Acrylic on Paper, 40” x 28”, 2013
Untitled, Acrylic and Pen on Paper, 6” x 6”, 2012
Untitled, Acrylic and Pen on Paper, 6” x 6”, 2012
Untitled, Oil on Panel, 5" x 5 inch., 2013
Collapsing Hegemon, Graphite and Acrylic on Paper, 11” x 11”, 2011
Untitled, Graphite on Paper, 8” x 10”, 2009
Ilovaisk (2014), Graphite on Paper, 14 x 9 inch., 2015
Exhibit A, Sanford Meisner Theater, Chelsea, New York, NY, 2007
Today, 164 Eleventh Avenue survives only in memory, its footprint absorbed into The Cortland, a 26-story apartment building whose entrance now faces 23rd Street.