Rita Damasceno | UR

In German, the prefix “ur-” indicates primordialness. According to Hesiod’s Greek mythology, Chaos, the most primeval form of divine consciousness, gave origin to the universe, considering that this Greek word originally meant “emptiness,” or the primordial emptiness that drove creation. In this series of drawings, made with acrylic spackling, asphalt, and water-based white pen, Rita Damasceno simulates blackboards marked with chalk, where she presents various sorts of diagrams based on complex monochromatic formulas. Her intricate lines guide us through phrases, abbreviations, figures and equations, dictating the rhythm and orienting our understanding.

Rita Damasceno’s art reflects her interest in the uneasiness inherent to contemporaneity, along with human thought and its processes of movement and autonomy. The artist resorts to these areas of knowledge as an intellectual support to pose questions informed by her training in philosophy and political science. The exhibition UR presents the essence of Rita Damasceno’s work, where the aesthetics of diagrams are used to organize and convey thought narratives through a combination of image, poetry, text and cognition. Through this dialectic game, her works propose reflective exercises concerning the state of our thought in contemporaneity and its contexts. These exercises are both for herself, as a way of questioning the world, as well as for the viewers, who need to go beyond the barrier of simple appreciation in order to actually assimilate the work. The theoreticians who have most inspired the artist’s thinking include the French thinkers Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Derrida, as well as the German Hans-Georg Gadamer, Sybile Krämer, Christian Driesen, Mathias Bauer and Susanne Leeb.