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A collection of workers’ shirts, mounted like shopping displays and gathered into the regimented, brightly coloured rows that might mark a labour demonstration, stands as the centrepiece of Jonathas de Andrade’s solo exhibition One to One (2019), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) The shirts are men’s Paint daubs and sweat stains trail across them, and the work, Suar a camisa (Working up a sweat) (2014), captures much of the dense, reticent logic of de Andrade’s art   De Andrade acquired the shirts from male workers in the streets of Recife and the countryside of Brazil’s Nordeste, his home city and region, and a cohering local force in his art He would approach workers on their off hours, as they travelled to work or commuted home, clearly attracted by the shirts’ vividness, their lambent yellows or soiled oranges, as well as their ability to signify – they appear worn, sturdy, industrial, as if they’ve just emerged from under the hood of a car Striking up conversations with the men, he would begin a line of inquiry: could he buy their shirt, or propose a deal, or – the preferred option – exchange his own for theirs? It’s hard to imagine the exchange coming to fruition, and yet the process resulted in de Andrade receiving 120 shirts, hung on poles and assembled in the centre of MCA’s gallery, a crowd of hollow figures   The work unfolds in layers, and my first impression was of a kind of startling political presence, as if 120 working men stood at the centre of MCA Here, it seemed, was a sincere and wishful image of the working class, its labour expressed through the sweat-marks and enlivened into the collective form of a workers’ protest But as I circled the installation, a contradictory possibility soon shadowed my optimistic impression as presence gave way to a more definitive sense of absence Not a popular uprising but shirts without bodies, dead labour rather than labour, adding up not to working-class potency but its waning or disorganisation This feeling was made more potent by the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro,