WOW! É PRECISO ESTAR ATENTO E FORTE, NÃO TENHO TEMPO DE TEMER A MORTE. ATENÇÃO!! (Wow! You ought to be cautious and strong, don’t have the time to fear death. Attention!!) So proclaims the stenciled text—fundamental tropicália, sung by Gal Costa on her first solo LP—forming the border of the drawing Divino Maravilhoso (all works 2003). Marvelous indeed, cautious but fearless, Los Angeles–based Brazilian artist Nicolau Vergueiro’s lively and complex work literalizes and materializes his musical interests to the point where they become a nonthematic structural foun- dation. It’s not just tropicalismo

Edgar Arceneaux’s Drawings of Removal is less a set of drawings than a perpetually in-progress studio space inaugurated in 1999 following a trip the artist and his parents took to his father’s hometown of Beaumont, Texas. Contemporary Beaumont barely resonated with what the father distantly recalled after four decades’ absence or what his son had visualized from family stories. Covering walls with paper; sketching, doodling; adding more paper; cutting through to reveal underlying layers; transplanting fragments between sheets; and playing with spatial orientation and expectation, Arceneaux uses

Imagine a gaggle of Expressionists, Cubists, Constructivists, Dadaists, Futurists, and early abstractionists coming of age after Pop amid the Pattern and Decoration movement and the rise of appropriation, and you might get a sense of Roy Dowell’s twenty-five modestly scaled, untitled, numbered works. These burlap-and-acrylic works on canvas and collages on illustration board (all works 2003) have much to do with early modernism yet seem to find their place in what could be called a post-postmodern moment.

Perhaps it’s too easy to describe work by one artist in terms of imagined combinations of