MILAN.- In Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion of Yoruba origin, the creation myth has it that the god Olódùmarè brought the world into being out of a primordial chaos made of water alone. The task of shaping this undefined mass was entrusted to the deity Obatalá, who molded human beings out of clay; however, having become intoxicated during the process, he produced forms that were varied and imperfect. Olódùmarè then animated their bodies by infusing them with a vital breath, a divine energy found in every living thing.
The choice of clay as a material is deeply meaningful: it is not yet form, but no longer chaos—it is potential, awaiting only a hand and an intention. In Obatalá’s shaping of it, an act of creation takes place, disorder becoming order through a never-ending process of transformation. A similar tension runs through the work of the Brazilian artist Adriano Costa: in his bronze sculptures, material and action are intertwined, spirituality and physicality coexist, while construction and destruction alternate in an almost infinite dynamic.
For Fist, his first solo exhibition showcasing his metal pieces, the artist spent weeks in a foundry in Milan, creating a new body of previously unseen works. Through a process bordering on alchemy, he transformed unfired clay into a new form of existence, pushing its properties and nature to their very limits. Costa worked the clay for hours, striking, deforming, and piercing it: hammers and knives replaced traditional tools, followed by thermal processes at varying high temperatures, generating forms suspended between control and chance.
The surfaces of the sculptures retain traces of these interventions, manipulations, and acts of violence, bearing witness to how direct and physical the artist’s relationship with the material really is: it is not simply shaped but subjected to tension—a kind of “forging of the world,” in which Costa’s input sees it transformed or recreated. The works become extensions of a way of thinking and a state of being: they speak not only of form, but also of how reality is perceived and experienced—an unstable dimension in which even precariousness and error are of value.
This spiritual plane finds another parallel in Candomblé. In its rituals, participants do not merely pray to the deities but enter into direct relationships with them through the body, movement, and altered states. The physical alterations and sensory intensity of these practices echo the way Costa works with materials, having them undergo continuous modifications in which the boundaries between art, life, and objects become blurred.
His work is deeply visceral: deformations, drips, and accumulations evoke a constant, existential redemption. “I keep thinking that the spiritual path is the path, the only way to change something at a deep level, and this applies to the arts, too,” the artist has stated. Within this process, the distinction between construction and destruction is weakened to such an extent that it nearly disappears, much as in Candomblé, where destruction is not the opposite of creation—it is its condition. There is no imperfection. There is only the vestige of the divine.
