José Damasceno: Integrated Circuit

Issue 43, Summer 2010. See the entire magazine online here.

Thomas Dane Gallery, London
1 April – 1 May

By Coline Milliard

When so many artworks are weighed down by the desire to make sense, to deliver content or to create ‘meaning’, encountering José Damasceno’s work is a refreshing experience. The Rio-based artist revels in meticulous but often humorous arrangements of shapes and materials. In his hands, formalism is not something to be dismissed (which seems to be the contemporary art-critical consensus) but sought. Damasceno invites his viewers to rediscover the pleasure of the primarily sensual: his work, in Susan Sontag’s formulation, demands not a hermeneutics but an ‘erotics of art’.

On a pristine snooker table, spheres of milky pink quartz, crimson red dolomite and glistening black jasper map a celestial system in precarious balance (Integrated Circuit, 2010). It could be interpreted as a game played by God, the balls awaiting the strike of a divine cue, another Big Bang. The symbols are plentiful, and deeply rooted in ancient cosmologies. In this instance, though, it is rewarding to follow Sontag and envisage the piece not for what it could signify, but for what it is: a splendid display of semiprecious stones, polished to perfection. Testifying to an infinitely slow formation, the layers of sediment appear on the spheres’ surfaces as intricate patterns of lines and dots which contrast with the lawnlike smoothness of the tabletop. Integrated Circuit is infused with the legacy of minimalism and relies on a viewer’s physical presence to fully function. Each step brings another perspective, another partial view of an artwork that remains, like the universe, ungraspable all at once.

Hanging on the wall, a small abstract tapestry picks up the startling colours of the table’s baize. It’s a fuzzy, disquieting tangle of stitches, unsettling the room’s peacefulness. Its title, Monitor (2010), suggests the TV screen of some amusement arcade, the first hint of Damasceno’s characteristic humour that runs throughout the rest of the show. The artistic references soon become too evident to ignore. In his ongoing series Projeto-Objeto (2006–), Damasceno uses, like a contemporary Joseph Cornell, the framed box as a template, a set space of freedom. The two examples on display here are lined with graph paper. Inside one is a second frame, its side cut open by a small arch; the shape brings to mind a mouse’s hole or the entry to a doghouse. A second look confirms this impression: a bronze dog sits defiantly atop the piece, as if showing off its canny escape from a geometric maze.

While this first box is an unlikely blend of nineteenth-century animal sculpture, Art & Language and Surrealism, the second, with its small slab of marble, nods towards classical statuary. This modest rectangle also introduces Eraser Sculpture (2010), a rendition of an oversize eraser in veined marble and precious wood, sat directly on the floor. As in many of his previous works (including the well-known pencil installations), Damasceno employs the apparatus of monumental sculpture – its proportions, or as here, its techniques – to foster another type of encounter with the mundane, where wonder supplants convoluted interpretations.

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