Jose Damasceno at the project

This impressive show was the U.S. solo debut for Rio-based artist Jose Damasceno. Known in Brazil for large-scale sculptures and installations using a variety of unorthodox materials and procedures, the 35-year-old artist was also featured in the recent exhibition "Living Inside the Grid: The Surfaces of Architecture in a Digital Age," at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Of the six large recent installation pieces and drawings at The Project, the most striking was Cinema-Objeto, featuring a 23-foot-long plywood box situated in the upstairs gallery. Seven feet high and several feet wide at one end, the structure tapers to a narrow section propped up by two-by-fours. At the smaller end is a peephole fitted with a magnifying glass like the lens of a large-format camera. Visible through a partly opened white-painted wooden door at the large end, the box's interior is half filled with long strands of off-white estopa, a type of raw natural fiber from Brazil, used for rope and packing materials. Peering into the box from either end, one has the sensation of a great distance, as if looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The incalculable dimensions of this seemingly limitless void are echoed by the countless strands of fiber filling the container.

Hung in the same room, Organograma is a large work on paper that puns on an exploration of the fourth dimension. Using three small rubber stamps bearing the words "Yesterday," "Today" and "Tomorrow," respectively, the artist printed three neat lines made of numerous words. A vertical line of "today" meets a horizontal row of "tomorrow" and a diagonal line of "yesterday," reaching toward the lower left. The three lines converge in a single point, which presumably corresponds to the present moment.

Two installations in the downstairs gallery demonstrated Damasceno's wry sense of humor. Metauction/Autocourt is made of hundreds of tiny wooden gavels piled UD on the floor to form two elements shaped like a giant gavel and block. In this work, the artist refers at once to legal decisions and to the art market's judgment of value in the auction house. Sonic Foam I is made of numerous black-painted-iron music stands. A visually cacophonous arrangement of interlocking units placed upside down or piled high like tall bushes or trees, the work mimics Abstract-Expressionist sculptures and also suggests an atonal symphony. In these pieces and throughout the show, Damesceno proposes some exciting new relationships between form and process.

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