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 exhibition “Waltercio Caldas: The Nearest Air and Other Matters,” curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and Ursula Davila-Villa, includes four decades of objects, drawings, sculptures, and books. Some works featured in the show, such as Condutores de percepção (Perception Conductors), 1969, directly engage the vocabulary of scientific display: Here, a black velvet–lined case holds two hexagonal glass bars alongside a metal plate that bears the words of the work’s title. To what object do these bars direct our vision? Less a deictic gesture (look at this!) than a visual conundrum, the work reflects on the nature of apprehension by infinitely postponing the identification of an object. In many of his later pieces, by contrast, Caldas brings space—and the space between objects—alive. For example, the work that gives the show its title, O ar mais próximo (The Nearest Air), 1991, features colored arcs of yarn that hang from the ceiling, creating shimmering virtual planes intersected by vertical lines.

There are critics who find Caldas’s work too rational or even corporate in style. To my mind, such a reading gives undue prominence to the technical meticulousness of his production, rather than engaging what his art actually does at the moment of reception. Hence the curators did not include any didactic labels to decipher the enigmas of the pieces on display. But their careful selection itself ably conveys the ways in which each work creates its own space to secure the immanence of object and perception, creating a phenomenal field that obviates the certainty of idealist models of vision and empirical verification alike.

As part of their exhibition strategy, the curators abandoned the chronological structure that often characterizes retrospectives. In one gallery, for example, we found early works such as Convite ao raciocínio (Invitation to Reasoning), 1978, a turtle shell pierced by an iron tube, which was sited alongside the six stainless-steel circles traversed by colored yarn that make up Asas (Wings), 2008; also on view here were other examples of the artist’s more abstract later work. One could thus track the relentlessness with which Caldas has pursued the tension between what one sees and what one is given to understand. The lines of sight created within individual rooms and also from the atrium of the Fundação Iberê Camargo to its other galleries revealed the artist’s investment in materials, for example the polished wood and Carrara marble used to make the truncated spheres in Escultura para todos os materiais não transparentes (Sculpture for All Nontransparent Materials), 1985. Closer inspection also disclosed his engagement with art history and the nature of representation, especially prominent in his books, among them O livro Velázquez (The Velázquez Book, 1996), which features blurry reproductions of Velázquez’s paintings with the human figures removed.

The curators did provide a little guidance, in the form of an opening wall text. Here, they referred to a contemporary condition in which we are all “processing images rapidly,” suggesting that Caldas’s work requires time to be “slowed down.” Bearing this claim in mind, I would have liked to hear more from the curators about the difference between slowing down perception today and doing so in the Brazil of the 1960s and ’70s, during the time of military dictatorship, when Caldas made his first works. Caldas’s art cannot be reduced to the context from which it emerged, but nonetheless it is clear that his aesthetic stance takes on a different critical valence at different historical moments.

Indeed, given Caldas’s regional acclaim, one might find it surprising that his work exists largely under the global radar. This, I would argue, is precisely because it complicates and dismantles North American perspectives (academic, curatorial, and commercial) regarding what is today understood and legitimated as “Brazilian art”: It presents an alternative to the bodily, participatory aesthetics of figures such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, as well as to the more politicized Conceptualist practices of artists such as Cildo Meireles. Nor can it be easily subsumed under labels such as Minimalism and Conceptual art. Caldas’s art suspends viewers in a state of unknowing—of seeing as if for the first time. The show is thus a timely contribution to art history and criticism when the pressure to take a global purview too often results in the abandonment of historical depth. The question of how to account for the historical specificity of differently situated genealogies is one that this exhibition helps us to address.

“Waltercio Caldas: The Nearest Air and Other Matters” is currently on view (through Apr. 7) at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; travels to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, Oct. 27, 2013–Jan. 19, 2014.

Kaira M. Cabañas is the director of the MA in modern art program at Columbia University in New York.