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Lot Essay
“The artist’s perception is vital because it can change the world,” Camargo reflected in 1967. “You have an intuition of something, you have to concretize to know this intuition.” The concretion of Camargo’s own aesthetic had come just a few years earlier, following his move from Brazil to Paris in 1961 and his decisive encounter with postwar Constructivism. The rapid gestation of his now iconic white reliefs—modular and monochromatic, optical and organic—crystallized “a sort of symbiosis between me and these elements and the work and me,” he explained. “When I started working with these elements, I studied their possible combinations. But I had to discard what an element could do objectively and assimilate completely all of its expressive possibilities before I could create with it.” In his distillation of wood (and later, marble) into spare, cylindrical reliefs, Camargo created vital geometries—“plastic realities”—out of light and movement, space and time. “I want,” Camargo concluded, “with plastic elements, to create a poem” (in Paul Keeler, “Gimpel Fils, London; exhibit,” Studio International 187, no. 962, January 1974: 42).
His poetic turn developed out of an auspicious, if quotidian moment in 1963, as recounted by the critic Guy Brett:
Cutting an apple to eat it, he sliced off nearly half and then made another cut at a different angle to take a piece out. The two planes made a simple relationship of light and shadow. Camargo grasped it; unconsciously he had made the first cylindrical element. In the apple was the synthesis he had been working towards and which now united all the past stages of his work—the combination in a single element of substance (the rounded body of the apple) and direction (the plane he had just exposed). It is a synthesis of his thought and experience in a single sculptural sign (in Camargo, London: Signals London, 1966).
Brett and Camargo met in 1964, in Paris, and by the end of the year Camargo had opened his first solo exhibition in Europe at Signals, the experimental and groundbreaking gallery co-founded by Brett in London. Signals promoted kinetic and international art, and the gallery positioned Camargo among a transatlantic generation of artists working within geometric abstraction: the Venezuelans Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto; Arman and Antoni Tàpies; later Mira Schendel and Lygia Clark from Brazil.
Writing for the Signals newsbulletin, Brett drew additional parallels between Camargo’s reliefs and the work of Paul Cézanne, observing in both “a basically prismatic approach” in which the “distribution of light over the surface” leads to “the revelation of overall structure and the final liberation in optical movement.” Brett acknowledged that “the discovery of the wooden cylinder was a breakthrough for Camargo because it enabled him to leave out so much that was not essential and concentrate on what remained—the only way to true poetry.” For Camargo “the means are, and can be seen to be, transparently simple,” he continued, “but like Cézanne’s watercolours they are animated by an overall and compulsive spirit which allows the wealth and chaos from which the essentials have been drawn to be still strongly felt behind the architecture. It is abstraction in the truest sense—what is essential remains; it is not invented for its own sake” in (“Camargo,” Signals 1, no. 5, December 1964-January 1965: 5).
Camargo further evolved his cylinders over the decade, drawing international accolades and recognition. He contributed the monumental Muro estrutural (1965-67) to the auditorium of the Palácio Itamaraty, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, in Brasília. In 1963, he was awarded the International Sculpture Prize at the III Biennale de Paris, and he won the National Sculpture Prize at the VIII Bienal de São Paulo in 1965. The following year, Camargo represented Brazil at the XXXIII Venice Biennale, filling the national pavilion with twenty-two works, among them the marble sculptures Homenagem a Brancusi and Torre Modulada as well as a version of Chant du couple in 16 temps. In his review, the critic David Thompson praised “the admirable new Brazilian building, where Camargo’s white sculptures and reliefs impressively exploit the play of texture and light in splintered, angled surfaces which manage to be simultaneously lively, varied and strangely calm.” (in “Reflections on the Biennale,” Studio International 172 (August 1966): 81). Following the Biennale, Camargo held three solo exhibitions in Italy in 1967, first in Milan and then in Rome and in Genoa, where the present work was exhibited at Galleria La Polena.
Chant du couple en 16 temps explores the variable affinity between two cylinders—a couple—across sixteen frames arranged in a white monochrome grid. A microcosm of a relationship, the relief is study of repetition and lyrical restraint: the cylinders converge and separate, crane toward one another and turn away. “The work [becomes] a game and a structure, touchable and untouchable, limit and limitless, light and shade,” observed the critic Mário Pedrosa, his words no less a metaphor for the vagaries of a relationship, the play of opposites and the nature of attraction. “The shadows come with the light, and the reliefs that are nothingness exchange the visual for the tactile,” he continued. “Idea, rather than form, drives the plastic structures of Camargo’s art and causes its permanent openness and enigmatic communicative force” (in “A Escultura de Camargo,” 1975, in Brazilian Sculpture from 1920 to 1990: A Profile, Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, 1997, 27).
An emotional idea stirs across Chant du couple en 16 temps, its sensuality sublimated by the stark simplicity of the monochrome construction. The changing positionality of the couple, whose relationship unfolds over sixteen discrete moments in time, animates a range of feelings—desire and repulsion, oneness and difference—innate to human experience. “Like a scale of visual ‘sounds,’” in Brett’s words, Camargo’s cylindrical pairs project a subtle musicality within the formal order of the grid, their arrangements a serial meditation on proximity, adjacency, juxtaposition (in Kinetic Art: The Language of Movement, London: Studio-Vista, 1968, 48). “Perhaps what happens with my work,” Camargo reflected, “is that it liberates, releases in whoever approaches it some diffuse emotion, something like what we occasionally experience in front of certain faces or landscapes, or when we feel space, sand or the wind” (Ibid., 50).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
His poetic turn developed out of an auspicious, if quotidian moment in 1963, as recounted by the critic Guy Brett:
Cutting an apple to eat it, he sliced off nearly half and then made another cut at a different angle to take a piece out. The two planes made a simple relationship of light and shadow. Camargo grasped it; unconsciously he had made the first cylindrical element. In the apple was the synthesis he had been working towards and which now united all the past stages of his work—the combination in a single element of substance (the rounded body of the apple) and direction (the plane he had just exposed). It is a synthesis of his thought and experience in a single sculptural sign (in Camargo, London: Signals London, 1966).
Brett and Camargo met in 1964, in Paris, and by the end of the year Camargo had opened his first solo exhibition in Europe at Signals, the experimental and groundbreaking gallery co-founded by Brett in London. Signals promoted kinetic and international art, and the gallery positioned Camargo among a transatlantic generation of artists working within geometric abstraction: the Venezuelans Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto; Arman and Antoni Tàpies; later Mira Schendel and Lygia Clark from Brazil.
Writing for the Signals newsbulletin, Brett drew additional parallels between Camargo’s reliefs and the work of Paul Cézanne, observing in both “a basically prismatic approach” in which the “distribution of light over the surface” leads to “the revelation of overall structure and the final liberation in optical movement.” Brett acknowledged that “the discovery of the wooden cylinder was a breakthrough for Camargo because it enabled him to leave out so much that was not essential and concentrate on what remained—the only way to true poetry.” For Camargo “the means are, and can be seen to be, transparently simple,” he continued, “but like Cézanne’s watercolours they are animated by an overall and compulsive spirit which allows the wealth and chaos from which the essentials have been drawn to be still strongly felt behind the architecture. It is abstraction in the truest sense—what is essential remains; it is not invented for its own sake” in (“Camargo,” Signals 1, no. 5, December 1964-January 1965: 5).
Camargo further evolved his cylinders over the decade, drawing international accolades and recognition. He contributed the monumental Muro estrutural (1965-67) to the auditorium of the Palácio Itamaraty, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, in Brasília. In 1963, he was awarded the International Sculpture Prize at the III Biennale de Paris, and he won the National Sculpture Prize at the VIII Bienal de São Paulo in 1965. The following year, Camargo represented Brazil at the XXXIII Venice Biennale, filling the national pavilion with twenty-two works, among them the marble sculptures Homenagem a Brancusi and Torre Modulada as well as a version of Chant du couple in 16 temps. In his review, the critic David Thompson praised “the admirable new Brazilian building, where Camargo’s white sculptures and reliefs impressively exploit the play of texture and light in splintered, angled surfaces which manage to be simultaneously lively, varied and strangely calm.” (in “Reflections on the Biennale,” Studio International 172 (August 1966): 81). Following the Biennale, Camargo held three solo exhibitions in Italy in 1967, first in Milan and then in Rome and in Genoa, where the present work was exhibited at Galleria La Polena.
Chant du couple en 16 temps explores the variable affinity between two cylinders—a couple—across sixteen frames arranged in a white monochrome grid. A microcosm of a relationship, the relief is study of repetition and lyrical restraint: the cylinders converge and separate, crane toward one another and turn away. “The work [becomes] a game and a structure, touchable and untouchable, limit and limitless, light and shade,” observed the critic Mário Pedrosa, his words no less a metaphor for the vagaries of a relationship, the play of opposites and the nature of attraction. “The shadows come with the light, and the reliefs that are nothingness exchange the visual for the tactile,” he continued. “Idea, rather than form, drives the plastic structures of Camargo’s art and causes its permanent openness and enigmatic communicative force” (in “A Escultura de Camargo,” 1975, in Brazilian Sculpture from 1920 to 1990: A Profile, Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, 1997, 27).
An emotional idea stirs across Chant du couple en 16 temps, its sensuality sublimated by the stark simplicity of the monochrome construction. The changing positionality of the couple, whose relationship unfolds over sixteen discrete moments in time, animates a range of feelings—desire and repulsion, oneness and difference—innate to human experience. “Like a scale of visual ‘sounds,’” in Brett’s words, Camargo’s cylindrical pairs project a subtle musicality within the formal order of the grid, their arrangements a serial meditation on proximity, adjacency, juxtaposition (in Kinetic Art: The Language of Movement, London: Studio-Vista, 1968, 48). “Perhaps what happens with my work,” Camargo reflected, “is that it liberates, releases in whoever approaches it some diffuse emotion, something like what we occasionally experience in front of certain faces or landscapes, or when we feel space, sand or the wind” (Ibid., 50).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park