The Venezuelan artist José Antônio Hernández-Diez returns to São Paulo to inaugurate an exhibition in Galeria Fortes Vilaça, two years after his participation in the XXIV São Paulo Bienal. His last commercial show in the city took place at Galeria Camargo Vilaça in 1999.

In Hernández-Diez's work, high and popular culture intersect, philosophical references are translated into everyday forms and images. The work enters into direct relation with the world in which we live. In this exhibition, the signs of contemporary life are present once again, manipulated and reconstructed within the art. Hernández-Diez is showing two sculptures, one large and one small, that incorporate the stylized form of a series of escalators supported by wood cubes. The result is formally post-minimalist, but examination of these sculptures calls up more ironic or even emotive interpretations.

The title of the larger work, "Gulliver", probably refers to the powerful image of tiny people on the escalators in malls and airports. The sculpture also alludes to a cinematographic concept, "traveling," if we think of people who rise and fall on the escalators, crossing ways and looking at each other briefly, a momentary intersection.

The artist appropriates the familiar image of ordinary clothes such as jeans and knit shirts to create a series of evocative black-and-white photographs. These compositions are entitled "Care" and once more integrate reality, external as well as intimate, for our clothes are closest to us, and for them to last, they need to be taken care of in a certain way, such as being washed at specific temperatures. Behind an immediate pop appearance, these photographs portray analogies with personal relationships.

A resident of Barcelona, Hernández-Diez had a show there at the start of this year in Galeria Estrany de la Mota, and last year he participated in the most recent Venice Biennial with the curator Carlos Basualdo. In 2002, the artist's work received a retrospective show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.