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The Project, New York and Los Angeles, will present, March and April, the first bicoastal exhibition of the Brazilian born and Rio de Janeiro based artist José Damasceno.
Having started his studies in architecture, Damasceno disrupts properties of scale, proportion and dimension to construct new paradigms of spatial perception and self-awareness.
Damasceno's manipulation of diverse materials,objects, such as cigarettes, carpet, marble, wood, pencils, or hammers explores the subjective conditions under which meaning, order and representation are perceived
The Project, Los Angeles (March 5 through April 16) will exhibit three works: Imminent Circuit (2005), Method for Tracing and Mapping (2005), and Poco a Poco (2005).
In Imminent Circuit, Damasceno presents over-sized billiard balls fashioned from semi-precious stones, also having an actual, regular wooden triangle used to set the billiard balls, hanged on the wall, this bringing an abrupt displacement concerning the sense of scale.
The distance between the cue and first ball is proportional to a distance found in an actual game of pool. Damasceno's play with it and the subjective presence of potential energy charges the exhibition space with tension that evokes an imminent collision in which placid organization becomes chaotic and unforseen motion.
Method For Tracing and Mapping is a floor and wall installation composed from cut carpet. A shape, units of a manifold pattern, are cutted repetitiously from the floor carpet and then transposed to the walls of the gallery, creating a spatial reciprocal situation evocative of organizational diagrams wiht different possible paths.
Poco A Poco is similarly concerned with the conditions of subjective engagement. A wall drawing that consists of clusters of large scale black matte vinyl dots that accumulate throughout the exhibition space evoking the feeling of close perception in which objects slowly extend beyond the edges of peripheral vision also regarding how images are represented, as a photo, for example, has grains, a large quantity of dots.
There are different groups of dots each of them along the wall, side by side, creating a sort of cartoon, inquiring a present notion of movement, something happens with these frames, are they growing, moving, changing? Damasceno's dots begin at the scale which alters the viewer’s relative perception of distance; they allude to loose dimensional order which is always, perceptually, just out of reach.
The Project
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