Presented in the Octagon project space at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, The Commons, 2010, is further example of Paul Ramírez Jonas’s investigations of art’s social contingency. Foregrounding the different ways in which art becomes public as it enters various zones of social contact, Ramírez Jonas typically deploys objects, sculptural installations, and “public works” to explore agency and meaning. For the 2005 “inSite_05” exhibition in San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, for instance, the artist produced a situational, research-based project, Mi Casa, Su Casa (My House, Your House), which

A strange sort of tension filled the two rooms occupied by Iran do Espírito Santo’s solo show; like the calm before a storm, it seemed to be generated by pent-up energy before its release. At the core of the Brazilian artist’s work is an interest in what he describes as “the duality we live in; between the concrete world and that of ideas. It’s an existential human condition; the artworks are a way of negotiating this, a need to deal with immateriality.” Espírito Santo, who has exhibited consistently since the mid-1980s, has established an aesthetic that reflects his conceptual concerns by means