Biomes II is the second part of Costas Picadas collection Biomes. The series is formed of five new video works and three still images and it includes selected works from the artist's two series titled Biomes and Biophilia. Fascinated by nature's potential for regeneration, Picadas overlays the natural imagery he takes from forests with cell imagery from labs, as a way of drawing comparisons between those life forms.
"Is it a romantic notion to assume that art has healing powers, that it could make the world a better place, or the individual a healthier person? These questions come up as I look at the work of Costas Picadas. The artist grew up in a family of doctors in Greece, but he decided to take a different path, attending art school in Paris before moving to his current home base of New York. Picadas mixes an interest in medical science with a personal, experiential study of nature. These elements blend together in his artworks, including in the recent Biomes series, which presents projections of slow-moving images, as well as prints and drawings, all showing natural and abstract motifs.
The projections feel at times like looking through a microscope into the body of a human being or the tissue of a plant. A world of patterns, of tubes and circular forms, appears. All are connected in an ingenuous structure, and in a slow, ongoing movement. Then, mixed with such close ups, a landscape image may emerge, a view we recall from spending time outside: the leaves of a tree shimmering in the sunlight, or a flower opening and closing again. It appears as a stretch of time condensed into ten or twenty seconds. Bringing all of these different perspectives together into one work, with images blending into each other, the artist gives insights into the complex architecture of the world as it surrounds us but is also inside of us. We zoom in on what we cannot see with our bare eyes, and in the work, this is connected to the world as we know it from looking outside." - Jurriaan Benschop
