OPENINGS: SANDRO CINTO.

"Sometimes I see [an artwork] so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave." It was this kind of feeling (expressed by Nick Shay, one of the narrators of Don DeLillo's Underworld) that I had when I first saw Sandra Cinto's art, at the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal, and it has stuck with me, as if some silent warning, through subsequent encounters with her work. Something about Cinto's precisely executed, almost unbearably intimate drawings and installations feels perishable.

At the Bienal, in the superb section devoted to work by contemporary Brazilian artists, Cinto presented a simply framed photograph of a thin, pale forearm held against a pale flesh-colored background. Surrounded by bigger, bolder sculptures and installations and merging with the muted hue of the wall, the untitled 1998 photograph seemed unassuming, even humble. The forearm, held in a vulnerable position--exposed from just above the elbow down almost to the wrist--bore an elaborate ink drawing that looked like a homemade tattoo. The arm drawing crept onto the torso-like background so that the disembodied limb itself became part of a broader work, or body, that encompassed it. A large, subtly rendered wall drawing covered a surface near the photograph, and if one took in both pieces, a vocabulary of Cinto's forms emerged: Multipronged candelabras opening out into tiny incandescent light-bulbs, ladderlike shapes starting and ending nowhere, sublime treetops and mountain peaks jutting up and out from little, sketchy horizons. There was something quaint but also disarmingly intimate about the interaction between the drawings and the Gober-esque limb: the quaintness of an illustrated children's book, of writing on one's own body; the intimacy of broached privacy, of exposure. Confronted with this strangely erotic artwork, and sensing something approaching impropriety--like the sensation you might have if caught perusing someone else's diary--I did not linger.

I ran into Cinto's art again, of course (as Freud would have it, the uncanny thrives on unexpected repetition)--this time at Casa Triangulo, a gallery near the heart of sprawling Sao Paulo. Walking through the small rooms in the gallery space was a bit like exploring the contours of a dream in which the human body ceased to be the central measure of scale. Several rooms displayed Cinto's imaginary topographies, including the romantic precipices of the large drawing paisagem (Landscape), 1998, and membranous images on white-painted wood panels. An untitled 1998 photograph of part of a face in extreme close-up looked like a drawing; the photo's blue-green hues, covered by tiny lines of cilia opening out into an incandescent central space (an eye?), were reminiscent, in their viscosity and luminosity, of Lygia Clark's psychotherapeutic art experiments. In another room, a small, shiny, not-quite-full-size, white fiberglass carousel horse, held in place by a vertical beam extended from floor to ceiling, stood in a small room near the gallery entrance, a slightly kitschy, even unicorny icon of the childhood imaginary. Koons's bunny and Kelley's fuzzy animals immediately sprang to mind, but Cinto's pristine cavalo branco (White horse), 1998, seemed decidedly less a critique of value or of sentimentality than an impassioned circumscription of desire. Was the static room itself the vacant carousel, circulating ephemeral wisps of an incomplete memory? Elsewhere, an installation, also from 1998, featured a long, thin bed frame implausibly suspended across two precipices jutting out from opposing walls; its title, a ponte imposivel (Impossible bridge), aptly expresses the way Cinto's work hovers between the sublime and the corporeal. A bridge "grants locations" to each of the sides that anchor it. Heidegger unsurprisingly claims that this definition of a bridge extends to the span between birth and death that we call life. But Cinto's bridge/bed is "impossible," because no one could ever lie in it without destroying the str ucture. Like Cinto's work in general, a ponte impossivel remains precisely but fragilely poised.

Last summer Cinto had her first US show (in fact her first show outside Brazil), "Constructed Happiness," a solo exhibition at Bonakdar Jancou in New York, and her latest work seems to be taking drawing to its vanishing point. The gallery space was turned into a home of sorts, though a decidedly "unhomely" one: The two-room installation consisted of a wooden cabinet, a three-legged table, a small bathtub half filled with water, and a windmill-like fan, all of which were partially drawn on. As she had for the Bienal, Cinto wrapped her ballpoint iconography--elegant graffiti emitting a faint surrealist aroma--around the corners of the yellowish-white walls, turning the drawing into a kind of invasive plant. Along with the ladders, trees, and candelabras, there were more violent (but not exactly mimetic) images of thorns, knives, and gallows, and this wall drawing looked more forebodingly nightmarish than dreamlike. The furniture drawings seemed to have seeped from their surfaces to the surrounding walls, as if their forms were bleeding outward in camouflage-like patterns. On one of these walls, a vertical photographic diptych presented, on top, the vague silhouette of Cinto's body lying on a bed with a three-legged frame, and, below, a vacant, monochromatic yellowish-white space. The photographs were mounted beneath curved glass onto which Cinto etched a drawing. The gallery light cast shadows directly on the diptych's surface, leaving the impression of an ethereal, mutable self-portrait in a convex mirror.

Nico Israel is a frequent contributor to Artforum.