JOSÉ PATRÍCIO

Influenced by Concretism, Patrício’s work creates a sense of playfulness through the tension between predictability and indetermination, offering viewers an interpretation in a more sensitive and less automatised way. For several decades, Patrício has developed his own visual language by examining the traditional usage of various materials, such as buttons, dominoes, and dice. He utilises these found objects to form geometric compositions and reveals the constructive tendency in Brazilian art. Instead of being organised at random, his work follows an order that provides multiple possibilities of reading: it is up to the audience to view the work in either ascending or descending numerical sequence in either a centripetal or centrifugal direction. This vertiginous experience of appreciation reinforces the playfulness and suggests the fact that repetition creates differences.

On view is a series of paintings that provokes a dialogue with the installation and examines how the viewer’s perception is affected by the artist’s algorithm and the desire to rationalise the notion of an object. Dominoes, a popular game in Latin America, requires the participants to have a good memory, mathematical skills, and luck. Playing with dominoes involves disarrangement and arrangement: the pieces have to be mixed at random when a game is over, and they should be placed in order again based on one’s drawn pieces. Patrício combines the pieces to form chromatic and graphic patterns by applying different colours on the dots. Although the installation varies in each exhibition, the same mathematical formula can be found in Patrício’s dominoes installation. The dominoes are displayed as loose pieces without using any glue or cement to fix them on the floor; precariousness is aroused when spectators walk around them, which is a metaphor for the element of chance.

’Imago Mundi, the dominoes installation, symbolises and refers to the concept of a unit, in turn a totality and of the manifestation of a whole as the result of a permanent creative action. The integral is a recurring idea in my work. Other works of mine can also encapsulate this, but I believe that the series Imago Mundi definitely embodies this aspect, simultaneously producing repetition and diversity.’

—José Patrício