Thomas Erben presents the New York debut of the emerging artist Joshua Cardoso (b. 1979). Large-scale drawings brimming with his distinct, meticulous marks will be contextualized with mixed media sculptures and sound within the architecture of the gallery space.

In his drawings, Cardoso has created a formal language, in which letters, numbers, and glyphs swarm and cluster in frenzied movements, finite but unfixed. The accumulation of tiny marks creates a highly seductive microscopic or cosmic myriad as observed through the apparatus of science or a non-ordinary state of consciousness. The seemingly intangible forms evoke both a scientistic knowledge of nature and a personal confrontation with the sublime.

The artist takes perception itself as his subject, exploring it through multiple points of departure and media. Contrasting the cosmic point of view in the drawings, the sculptures – made of plywood and plexiglass for this exhibition – monumentalize such concepts as the four cardinal directions or the bi-cameral brain. His perspective reflects elements of biological psychology, the new physics, the post-structuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as the symbols and cosmologies of different mystical traditions.

Cardoso received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2004, where he studied with Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Walid Raad, among others. He is currently curating a group show at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Redhead Gallery concerning the psychology of the American, bourgeois male.

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