Côme Mosta-Heirt

 Côme Mosta-Heirt became neither a painter nor a sculptor. He is a visual artist who rejects the idea of installations: “they’re for bathrooms”, he jokes. Instead, his work questions the relationship between painting and sculpture, above all in space. His method consists of arranging volumes of coloured wood. Before they are allotted their places, it is as if they did not exist. His art is a continuous hesitation that is resolved in action, in doing. He uses a band saw to cuts lengths of wood of various sizes, working in random fashion to produce unexpected angles: almost a form of automatic writing. He then assembles them in the simplest possible way, just as they come, and applies successive coats of paint, using varnish from the first coat onwards, resulting in a very dark colour rendition. His exploration of space through paint has led him to produce geometrical shapes that he calls “jambs” and “structures”, modules akin to branches or living ramifications.