"Sometimes I diocese [an artwork] so moving I know I'm not suppos to linger.

"Sometimes I diocese [an artwork] so moving I know I'm not suppos to linger. descry it and leave. If you stay too extended you wear out the wordless clash Love it and trust it and leave." It was this kind of feeling (express by dint of Nick Shay, one of the narrators of Don DeLillo's Underworld) that I had when I first saw Sandra Cinto's art, at the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal, and it has stuck with me as if a certain quantity of silent warning, through subsequent clashs with her work. Something about Cinto's precisely execut almost unbearably intimate drawings and installations be stirreds perishable.

At the Bienal, in the exquisite section devoted to work on contemporary Brazilian artists, Cinto at handed a simply framed photograph of a thin, pale forearm held against a pale flesh-colored background. hem ined by bigger, bolder sculptures and installations and merging with the mut color of the wall, the untitled 1998 photograph looked unassuming, even humble. The forearm, held in a vulnerable position--exposed from just above the shoulder down almost to the wrist--bore an elaborate ink drawing that considered like a homemade tattoo. The arm drawing crept onto the torso-like background in this way that the disembodied limb itself became part of a broader work, or dead body that encompassed it. A large, subtly presented wall drawing covered a surface near the photograph, and if the same took in both pieces, a vocabulary of Cinto's forms emerged: Multipronged candelabras opening not at home into tiny incandescent light-bulbs, ladderlike shapes starting and ending nowhere, sublime treetops and mountain peaks jutting up and on the outside from little, sketchy horizons. There was something quaint yet also disarmingly intimate about the interaction between the drawings and the Gober-esque limb: the quaintness of an illustrated children's work of writing on one's allow body; the intimacy of broached privacy, of front Confronted with this strangely erotic artwork, and sensing something approaching impropriety--like the sensation you might have if caught perusing someone else's diary--I did not linger.

I ran into Cinto's art again, of course (as Freud would have it, the uncanny thrives onward unexpected repetition)--this time at Casa Triangulo, a gallery near the heart of sprawling Sao Paulo. Walking end the small rooms in the gallery space was a bit like exploring the contours of a dream in which the human carcass ceased to be the central measure of scale. Several latitudes displayed Cinto's imaginary topographies, including the romantic precipices of the large drawing paisagem (Landscape), 1998 and membranous images forward white-painted wood panels. An untitled 1998 photograph of part of a face in greatest close-up looked like a drawing; the photo's blue-green tinges covered by tiny lines of cilia opening gone out into an incandescent central space (an eye?) were reminiscent, in their viscosity and luminosity, of Lygia Clark's psychotherapeutic art experiments. In another place a small, shiny, not-quite-full-size, white fiberglass carousel horse, held in place by way of a vertical beam extended from floor to ceiling, stood in a small latitude near the gallery entrance, a slightly kitschy, on a level unicorny icon of the childhood imaginary. Koons's bunny and Kelley's fuzzy animals immediately sprang to mind, still Cinto's pristine cavalo branco (White horse), 1998 have the appearanceed decidedly less a critique of value or of sentimentality than an impassioned circumscription of desire. Was the static sweep itself the vacant carousel, circulating ephemeral wisps of an incomplete memory? Elsewhere, an installation, also from 1998 featured a drawn out thin bed frame implausibly suspended across sum of two units precipices jutting out from opposing walls; its title, a ponte imposivel (Impossible bridge), aptly expresse the way Cinto's work flutters between the sublime and the corporeal. A bridge "grants locations" to each of the sides that anchor it. Heidegger unsurprisingly claims that this definition of a bridge lengthen outs to the span between birth and death that we call life. if it be not that Cinto's bridge/bed is "impossible," because no single in kind could ever lie in it without destroying the str ucture Like Cinto's work in general, a ponte impossivel remains precisely still fragilely poised.

Last summer Cinto had her first US point out to (in fact her first display outside Brazil), "Constructed Happiness," a solo exhibition at Bonakdar Jancou in just discovered York, and her latest work appears to be taking drawing to its vanishing point. The gallery space was make go rounded into a home of sorts, although a decidedly "unhomely" one: The two-room installation consisted of a ligneous cabinet, a three-legged table, a small bathtub half filled with water, and a windmill-like fan, all of which were partially drawn in succession As she had for the Bienal, Cinto wrapped her ballpoint iconography--elegant graffiti emitting a faint surrealist aroma--around the corners of the yellowish-white walls, turning the drawing into a kind of invasive plant. Along with the ladders, tree and candelabras, there were more violent (but not exactly mimetic) images of thorns, knives, and gallows, and this wall drawing expected more forebodingly nightmarish than dreamlike. The furniture drawings appeared to have seeped from their surfaces to the surrounding walls, as if their forms were bleeding outward in camouflage-like patterns. upon one of these walls, a vertical photographic diptych neared on top, the vague silhouette of Cinto's material part lying on a bed with a three-legg frame, and, below, a vacant, monochromatic yellowish-white space. The photographs were towered beneath curved glass onto which Cinto etched a drawing. The gallery light cast shadows directly forward the diptych's surface, leaving the impression of an ethereal, mutable self-portrait in a gibbous mirror.