A gruta (After Johan Moritz Rugendas, “Grotte près de S. Joze” –1835), 2006 colagem sobre impressão [collage on print], detalhe [detail] 90 x 130 cm | edição de 5 exemplares [edition of 5] coleção do artista [collection of the artist]

I once said that the most important thing Max Bill ever did was visit Brazil. The Concrete Art message which the Swiss artist and architect preached during his two visits there in the early 1950s (on one he toured the country as a guest of the Brazilian government) made such an extraordinary impression that it has dictated the general direction of Brazilian art ever since. As a result, there has been so much insistence on the Constructive nature of Brazilian art that it might actually be regarded as another of those clichés we art historians are so fond of. But when I travelled around Brazil a few years ago, I found that the cliché was true: the poetics of Concrete Art, its remnants and fragments, are very much a part of the way art is "done" there. When I looked at the work of artists of different ages and trends in a number of cities I also noticed just how much Brazilians tend to set up structures of form and content, create unusual "new realities", organize components serially, work by adding units, use geometry or a certain mathematical energy both directly and indirectly...

However, the unique case of Concrete Art's influence on one of the richest scenes in present-day art is actually more in the way Brazilians have reacted to it – in the process disarranging it with great ingenuity – than in how they have gone along with it. Thus, it is true to say that, despite their backgrounds connected with the analytical area of Concrete Art, Constructivism and geometric abstraction, classic artists like Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Cildo Meireles also subvert it, taking it down paths that contradict it in unusual ways. These paths have even implied a humanization and drawing closer of art to life that were to all purposes diametrically opposed to Concrete Art's agenda. But disarranging does not mean a complete denial. Indeed, from painting to video, the tension between the central use of well-defined formal conceptual and semantic structures and their simultaneous move towards other territories (without actually going beyond these structures) is a distinguishing feature of much of contemporary Brazilian art. Here I am referring not only to the particular historical practice of Neo-Concrete Art but to the poetics in general of Brazilian art since the 1960s which the former gave rise to when it so radically broke away.

Furthermore, artists in Brazil display a unique sensitivity towards the materials they use and an intimate closeness to them. Due to the imprint of Concrete Art, their works, even when influenced by post-conceptual poetics, also tend to be based on the object, its reality and physicality. Here I am, of course, speaking of prevalent trends which coexist with many other practices but whose consistency in this vast and diverse country (which also enjoys the greatest decentralization of art scenes in Latin America) is astonishing.

There is another valid stereotype in Brazilian art: its sensuality, when seen as both the adjectivization and participation of the body and the senses other than sight. It is significant that the two clichés with which it is usually burdened appear to be antitheses: constructivism and sensuality, grid and body. Yet they coexist there in interlocution, conferring and engaging in mutual transformation. Thus, continuing along these lines, Brazilian artists have – perhaps paradoxically – introduced expressiveness, sensuality, playfulness and at the same time rigour and structuring into post-minimalism and post-conceptualism; they have brought the utmost complexity to the aesthetics of the material, giving it a subjective payload and bringing a special form of sophistication and aestheticism to installation art. Indeed, I would wager that, even before identifying the artist, it would be possible to tell whether many installations were the work of a Brazilian or not.

All these features have contributed to diversifying, adding complexity and even subverting the practice of that "contemporary international idiom" that has gradually become established in art (like English has in the world) due to the explosion of its circulation globally over the last twelve years and local practices that have multiplied the world over. Sculpture and installation in particular have reached very special heights of refinement and complexity in Brazil since the 1960s. This practice has gone against a current which, generally speaking, was quite common in Latin America until not long ago. The neurosis over identity which so deeply affected the culture of this region led to an eagerness to display characteristic local differences while appropriating the resources of hegemonic art. Simply speaking, it was a combination of local forms and contents and "international" methodologies in which, as such, the latter were used to examine, express and depict national cultural components while undergoing adaptation and re-creation in the process. In the worst cases, there was even a "self-othering" that attempted to satisfy post-modern neo-exoticism.

Brazilian art, on the other hand, reversed that way of thinking by turning international methodologies into Brazilian methodologies, or by producing them locally in order to represent, discuss and convey "universal" content. Its character is not defined through representations or major activations of vernacular culture, religion, history or, in general, context itself, nor through the use of symbols – another feature frequent in Latin-American art – but through a specific way of making contemporary art. It is an identity detached from "identity". An identity based on action not representation. But also a praxis of art as art that establishes identifiable constants by building a cultural typology through its way of making art while not stressing the cultural factors interjected into it. Thus, much Brazilian art is identifiable because it refers more to ways of producing texts than to projecting contexts.

José Damasceno is both a paradigm of the direction taken by sculpture in Brazil and an artist with a unique personality. His very varied work never leaves us indifferent because it always seems to be asking questions. There are no formal or technical constants in his use of specific procedures or materials that enable his style to be immediately described. Nor is there a clearly established programme: his work is a succession of adventures and surprises. Except in his Organograma series, which, dealing as it does with time, is based on repetition, and his installations with objects forming drawings on walls, the artist does not repeat formulas or strategies: each is a work of personal reaction and investigation. However, if we examine his by now extensive production retrospectively, we notice a consistency, a personal stamp hard to define, easier to sense than to describe. The artist has spoken of a "unity originating in the field of the imagination", of "a mental nature" that determines what is selected and what the form should be.

Very appropriately and more objectively, it has been said that he works with systems. And indeed he does, by disarranging existing ones or creating new ones, or by establishing unusual relationships between them. Nevertheless, if we do not add other crucial nuances his work could be regarded as analytical, objective or revolving around mere structural research. But the case is exactly the opposite: his work could be said to be "post-structural" in that it does not seek to fix meanings or view systems as ordered functional entities. It would, however, be more exact to say that Damasceno is a poet of systems, due to his subjective approach and the synthetic images he produces, and, above all, because rather than dissecting things for us, he makes them more complicated. In other words, he tries to follow the skein of live reality – feeling it to be an open, multiple, burgeoning process – rather than shut himself away in some conceptual art laboratory. His whole oeuvre is a production of complications, a making of the elementary complex via displacement and subversion as simple as triggers of meanings. He does not see systems as harmonic groups but as a dynamic of forces in tension, a process of balances and imbalances causing changes and movements whose tensions he attempts to examine with his art.

Damasceno has insisted that what we call "reality" is a fabric of countless layers, dimensions, densities and porosities of all kinds. For him it is a constellation of dissimilar universes, an immense network of very structurally complex channels which move and change in accordance with another very vast universe – that of the different points of view from which we approach that network. A kind of open transcendental functionalism rules his view of the world and the position he adopts in the face of it is that of discoverer, governor. Afro-Cuban traditions speak of "eyes that have sight" capable of Seeing beyond. Ever since he lost the sight of his left eye in an accident, Damasceno says that he sees better. It is as if the loss of this physical ability had prompted the development of "another" form of vision already active in an artist whose purpose was to explore the intricate knots into which the universe is woven and, as he himself said, seek a "poetic instant forming the synthesis of all those movements". I believe that he may do this fully aware of the impossibility of such a task. There is a kind of pessimistic utopia in his work, which may be what makes it seem to have more to do with mystery than clarity, because it rests on the very interweaving of the systems it explores. Thus, Damasceno ultimately invents much more than he analyzes. And in any case, his pieces come across as revelations received in moments of hyper-lucidity, like snapshots taken by some metaphysical paparazzi showing us visions where, for a moment, there is an inkling of some clue to the Secrets.

For Damasceno is a Neo-Romantic who, in total opposition to the cynicism prevalent on today's art scene, sees the world as a mystery. A Neo-Romantic interested in order and science who through art seeks to visit those abstract points where mathematics dissolves into poetry. A Neo-Romantic whose subjectivity, instead of looking within the subject or only towards existence, applies itself to attempting to achieve an imagery of matter. A Neo-Romantic whose humanism is expressed in terms of a Verstehen of the things, forces and physical relationships of the universe, of a poetic knowledge of the macro and the micro, of what surrounds us but remains outside our dimension. Hence that peculiar encounter between materiality and subjectivity in his work. Adriano Pedrosa pointed out a duality in it: on the one hand "the organic and the corporal" and on the other "the geometrical and the mathematical" – and immediately warned us that both processes are interlaced.

As I said before, this is a characteristic of Brazilian art and Damasceno takes it to a climax of metaphysical subjectivity. However simple his sculptures and installations may seem, no matter how much they are based on energy that is either objectual or of objects, they are always governed by a transcendental will to go beyond the physical and its science. "The object is a whole of wholes (...) Inhabiting this object involves considering it as a world," Tunga said in reference to one of Damasceno's pieces. At the same time – and again as with so many Brazilian artists – we find that indication – slight yet deep-rooted – of Constructive Art in the background, concealed beneath the vibrant subjectivity of these works. However unusual, inventive or provocative these may be, they hardly ever "break free". I do not mean that this is a limitation, however, but a feature that contributes to the character of these projects. An important area in Brazilian art is based on disarranging pre-existing images, not as a design procedure but as part of a variety of aesthetic and discursive strategies. In a way, these subvert the constructive framework from within, though without breaking it; rather they extend its possibilities to hitherto unexplored fields and prompt a creative tension of meanings. Damasceno stands at nought degrees on the constructive will, order and disorder, and from there surprises us with acts of magic and philosophy. He once asked an astonishing and disturbing question that we often forget when we look at art: What if art looked at us? My answer would be that his art has vision.