Science at the start of the 20th century bet on a simple premise: the deeper one could peer into microscopic levels of reality, the more fundamental truths could be discovered. In a sense, it meant the smaller something could be split, the truer it should be.

In fact, the opposite happened: Things got odder, more complicated, the deeper scientists delved. The laws of quantum mechanics—the smallest of the small—upset almost everything science knew about the physical world, including Einstein’s big-picture explanation of the universe.

This paradox is akin to what happens in the large-scale drawings and sculptural pieces of Joshua Cardoso, the 26-year-old artist who explores this fallacy of positivistic thinking, as well as other heady issues of perception and cognition, in his aptly titled New York debut, Season of No Orient, currently on view at the Thomas Erben Gallery. The show is Cardoso’s second solo exhibition since receiving his BFA from the Cooper Union last year, where he studied with artists like Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Walid Raad.

The simple, barely legible shapes in drawings such as Gliding Horizon look like pencil-drawn wisps of smoke or wind-blown dust. But move closer and large clusters of tiny, hand-drawn symbols begin to emerge—numbers, letters, runes and glyphs covering the entire visual field. Step back again and you’re drawn into the effect of the undifferentiated swarm, swept up in the movement of the meticulously amassed but nonetheless meaningless symbols. Somehow, the two poles never add up.

I used the most basic symbols that can be distilled—circles, dashes, Xs—just really rudimentary forms that couldn’t be reduced any further,” says the Boston native. “These symbols are meaningless on their own—there’s no meaning you can trace back to anything specific. It’s part of this fascination I think science has of always seeking a smaller unit, this premium on smallness. Such a level of detail always eats away at truth.”

Looking for meaning in Cardoso’s beautifully articulated, rhizomatic shapes is to fall right into his ruse. Each form is less a text to be deciphered than an endurance test, culminating in an object on which little is read but the effort of its own making, often months of intensive, 12- to 14-hour days.

I always want the physical investment of my work to be on the surface, with every moment spent making them being present,” he says. “I think drawing is really made to do that, where as painting is self-effacing, it means always looking for that self-effacing perfection. With my drawings, it’s the opposite. I try to accumulate time—they’re almost like a pornography of effort.”

The mark of time and effort is also present in his installation, The Long Division Polar Crossing, made of four, wedge-shaped plywood sculptures covered in graphite and charcoal.

Running counterpoint to what Cardoso calls “the personal confrontation with the sublime” in his drawings, the piece is based on the four cardinal directions. Covered in alternating gray and black diamonds, the wedges represent the four arms of a compass rose, but turned into gray-scale monuments to left-and-right models of cognition.

You know how people say, ‘Don’t think in black and white’? But everyone spends a lifetime doing that! The sculptures are a model of that kind of simple thinking and clarity—they are my monumentalizing of that idea, but using differences you can barely really perceive,” Cardoso explains.

Like his multiply evocative drawings, the sculptures play on the idea of the effort it takes to make something artificial look organic. “They’re embarrassingly intensive, something that has the human mark of this dirty, almost blind labor all over it.”

The small signs he’s dotted throughout the gallery—inscribed with “You are the snow and the stars my dear” in white letters—follow a similar idea. But what appears to be a touching and emotional hand-written gesture in the midst of so much cold reasoning is in fact a serial, laser-etched metal plaque. It’s through such unsettling of expectations that Cardoso weaves the complex amalgam of ideas in the show, from chaos theory and the cosmologies of ancient religions, to the post-structuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

It’s all about seduction in the end,” Cardoso says. “I don’t believe I should be challenging anyone’s attention span. I try to get right in there, into their path of understanding, and entice the viewer to make sense of things. ”