Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present “Contato" ["Contact”] José Damasceno’s fourth solo exhibition in São Paulo. Two years after an exhibition in the Centro Cultural São Paulo, when he showed an installation composed of stickers meant for correspondence (“confidential” and “urgent”), the Rio de Janeiro artist returns with a hybrid exhibition. At first the seven works shown seem to clash with each other, but in the end they reveal the common trace of his unique style.

“Contact” is first and foremost an exhibition of sculpture, with a marked emphasis on the concepts that orient the use of the most diverse materials. Traditional questions of sculpture, such as volume, texture, and material, are intrinsically integrated into the artist’s logic. Other questions also dear to sculpture, such as empirical exercise, do not appear to be primary. Guided by surrealist references, Damasceno presents sculptures of notable conceptual complexity that demonstrate the force and vitality of his artistic thought.

In “Abstract Slice,” Damasceno constructs a three-dimensional and absurd interpretation of a typical statistical pie-graph, which shows the percentages of a supposed survey by means of colored slices of a circle. In this work, the “statistical slices” of distinct colors, sizes, and angles pass over each other, forming a virtual volume that is the result of the tangle of lines in space. On the gallery’s wall, Damasceno creates an analogous work, “Section of Landscape,” where hundreds of numbers glued onto the surface create a kind of wild landscape. An observer can make out the dialogue that occurs between “Abstract Slice” and “Section.”

“Part for a Machine of Imaginary Traction,” a sculpture that results from the junction of diverse mechanical parts, welded together to form a new, fictional industrial part, brings in a surrealist vein, impregnated by a sense of the absurd. In “Interface,” screws cross each other behind an acrylic sheet. In “Contact,” a jewelers’ magnifying lens becomes a creature that observes itself in a photograph of itself in a different location observing itself in a photograph of itself in yet another place and so on, a chain of displacement.

In a moment in the history of art when all possible artistic activities present themselves as explained and justified, Damasceno opts for a diffuse modus-operandi. In this show, he seems­ interested in reaching a zone, a signifying field, where the signifieds are not so obvious. In front of these works, spectators will find themselves thinking that there is a sense to it all, but that sense escapes them. “Contact” establishes a contact with that which we do not know for sure, with new points of view, new coordinates, and new mental vibrations.

This year, José Damasceno has had a solo show in the gallery The Project, in New York, and he participated in the group show “Living Inside The Grid,” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, also in New York. He is preparing an installation for the monumental wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, which will remain on display for one year after its inauguration next November.