Uri Costak

URI COSTAK (Barcelona, 1973)
"There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths". Nietzsche.
Intervened print with blue bic pen.
Hand signed.
Measurements: 100 x 70 cm.

This work belongs to a series of 18 portraits in which Uri Costak (Oriol Costa) takes photographs of great thinkers on the Internet, oversizes them and transforms them into "intellectual terrorists". He takes as a starting point Hannah Arendt's phrase: "there are no dangerous thoughts. Thought itself is dangerous". Painting their faces with bic pen transforming them into masks or "balaclavas" metaphorically serves to grant them the virtue of invisibility: to go "unnoticed" because of the danger of thinking.

Each author's motto also functions as a theoretical framework for the intervention. Nietzsche denies all absolute truth. The artist makes that spirit visible by disobeying the image, by intervening it in an almost childish but radical way, by denying the fixed "truth" of the photographic portrait.

Uri Costak is a self-taught artist. A writer and thinker, he has a degree in journalism. As a journalist he has worked as a reporter at La Vanguardia and as a scriptwriter at Cadena Ser. He has worked in the field of corporate and institutional communication and as creative director of various advertising agencies. He also teaches at the Master in Strategy and Creative Brand Management (UPF-BSM) and at the Elisava School.