IT IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to translate an encounter with Waltercio Caldas’s work into words. As soon as one attempts to articulate the effects of his production, one betrays one’s own experience and thus the work’s force. This very difficulty, however, is a consequence of the investigation into perception that is at the core of his endeavor. As the artist once explained, “It is the nature of the art object to preserve its destiny as hypothesis.” It follows that his works are like open experiments, but rather than providing an answer, they hold all verifiable visual truths at bay.

The retrospective

Following an artist’s career for more than twenty years, we construct a memory of him as an amalgam of images and experiences that have fascinated us and come to belong to us. I’ll never forget the first works I saw by Miguel Rio Branco: photographs of boxers training, highlighting the sensuality of the athletes’ very imperfections or the gleam of sweat on their skin, and the extraordinary film Nada levarei quando morrer, aqueles que mim deve cobrarei no inferno (I’ll Take Nothing with Me When I Die, Those Who Owe Me I’ll Collect in Hell), 1979–81, an exercise in gentle voyeurism revealing