José Damasceno

by Agnaldo Farias
São Paulo, Brazil, September 1997

When faced with the crossed-patterned guitars in space created by young Brazilian artist José Damasceno in the Rubell Albion Hotel Courtyard, the spectator will certainly smile. Yes, it causes us (Brazilians) to have the same reaction. The fact is that Latin American music has always been associated, at least in Hollywood movies, with maracas and guitars, let alone with heat, sensuality, fruit, fruit and more fruit.

Since the beginning of his career, good humor combined with a sense of estrangement have marked Damasceno's work. These are used in representing space--natural or constructed--as a moving dimension, thus altering our senses and our perceptions of it. The latter aspect is connected to the artists' debate about modern sculpture, first established more consciously in Brazil in the 50's and encountered in the works of Sergio Camargo, Amilcar de Castro, Willys de Castro, Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. These artists gave sculpture its abstract aspect and a peculiarity of being anti-monumental, as distinguished from other objects--daily articles--with their active and manipulative characteristics.

During the 60's, sculpture was said to be the "pure artistic expression". While this debate was taking root, Lygia Clark was creating her Bichos (Beasts) sculptures with moving levels. Her idea was to make sculpture assume different configurations when viewed by the spectator. At the same time, Helio Oiticica was creating Parangolàs--sculpture/clothes that could be worn. "Pure artistic expression" was a statement that both of them took to the extreme, trying to avoid the very concept of sculpture. Meanwhile, with his Penetráveis, Oiticica tried to fuse sculpture with urban architecture. The next step was carefully taken by Clark, directing her attention to sculptural investigation with a therapeutic emphasis. It was in this time that people like Cildo Meireles, Artur Barrio, Tunga, José Resende and Waltercio Cladas came forward. This brings us to today, to the young artists of the 90's where Damasceno takes his place.

Damasceno comes to us with an acute consciousness that, contrary to the assumptions in the accumulated experiences of our bodies, habituated to looking at the world from a distance, there is a concealed or secret fear in the limit of things. And the reader himself at this precise moment can if he wants to, if time is available, observe the line which forms the edge of the paper on which this text is written; its movement on the surface of the table. Or perhaps notice how one line goes through on the contours of one of your fingers, goes up the side of the arm, till it escapes from the back of your shoulders, going to who knows where.

As the artist tells us, space--natural or constructed--is never passive. It can suddenly oppose, refusing to sustain the reassuring boundaries of our bodies. Therefore, artistic interventions can cause the constitutive elements of architecture to come to life by acquiring unusual behaviors: floor tiles that dislocate themselves as if they were free from gravity, walls that wrap up, creating labyrinths with no entrance doors, the floor that swallows the objects into its surface.

And there are also the objects that, as with us, can either relate with the space or with themselves. As if out of a sleeping mode, the objects go on being attracted to each other, until each one of them is tranformed into a cell of a greater being. The whole then takes place, by the work of an invisible string, which goes through them and unites them both by its tension. But sometimes they take on a body: wires, strings or ropes that cross each other's path in space, capturing things, engaging them. They are like nerves, a line force, strings of a musical instrument. That is why it's enough for us to come closer, slowly, so we can sense their subtle melody and the secrets they sing.

Agnaldo Farias is the Brazil curator for CITY/CIDADE. He is currently working on his PhD at the São Paulo University (USP) - Department of Architecture and Urbanism. From 1995-1997, he has served as the Assistant Curator at the São Paulo Bienal Foundation; from 1993-1994 as the Fine Arts Director of the State Secretary of Culture, and from 1990-1992 as the Director of Temporary Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in São Paulo. He was the Assistant Curator for the 23rd International Bienal of São Paulo, Brazil (1996).

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