JOSÉ PATRÍCIO

‘This exhibition at Nara Roesler, in Rio, attempted to give a certain unity to the elements used and how they were employed–in this case, the object being buttons. On the other hand, the works have a kinetic aspect to them, that also creates a sense ofunity amongst the works,’ says the artist.

The works with buttons have 3,600 sub-squares each, and only one central space remains empty. The artist uses a grid with80 spaces on one side and 80 on the other, ‘totalling 3,600 squares that are filled with the buttons.’ The ways of filling thesquares are many, they are infinite, not only through the nature of the elements in use, but also through the sequence that canbe created in the structure.’ The exceptions are Kinetic Spirals II (2022) and Kinetic Spirals III (2022), two diptychs whichhave a kinetic bias and use the structure of 112 dominoes, another recurrent object in the artist’s work.

According to the artist, repetition is the master key of his work, ‘Like Nelson Rodrigues’ phrase–I wouldn’t exist without myrepetitions’–‘each concretisation of a work manages to be different. I always repeat, but also always have different results. Itis something that moves me, exercising getting new results from a given structure’, he explains.

José Patrício does not use projects or drawings to create his works. ‘Each work has its own requirements. I work with veryprecise procedures and I deal with the unforeseen a lot, with randomness. Most of the time I don’t know what the final resultwill be. This doesn’t worry me much either’, he affirms.

Another recurrent aspect in José Patrício’s work are the spirals. Facing almost infinite possibilities of ho to combine thebuttons, he works with two opposite movements, which generate two inverse spirals. He points out that ‘the spiral is whathelps me structure the work and the assembly of the work happens gradually, either from the centre to the edge, or from theedge to the centre.’

‘My work is very rational, but it deals with this other aspect that is chance, the question of the imponderable, the improbable.It’s always this play between order and chance. Just the fact of organising these elements in a grid, in a mesh, this orderalready brings something of harmony. Harmony that can be given inevitably by this organisation, independent of choice’.