The largest relief work by the artist to appear at international auction nearly a decade, Relief No. 183 is a masterwork, executed at the height of Camargo’s artistic development in 1967. Standing before the towering Relief No. 183, the viewer is overcome by a powerful feeling of dematerialization. Cascading streams of toquinhos, Camargo’s “little touches” of plaster and wood, shimmer and dance before the eye; as light passes across the warm wood and cool white over the course of minutes, shadowy forms emerge and recede in an infinite current.
Sergio Camargo was recognized as an emerging titan of twentieth-century abstraction by his late twenties. Having begun his artistic studies at sixteen under Lucio Fontana at Buenos Aires’ Academia Altamira, Camargo was immersed in avant-garde thought from his earliest artistic formation. However it was the dual influences of Gaston Bachelard, his philosophy professor at the Sorbonne, and Constantin Brancusi, his close friend and mentor through the 1950s, who would have the most profound influence on Camargo’s innovative plastic approach.
In Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, first published in 1958, the philosopher declares in reference to the cold atmosphere of late modernist architecture: “We are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms… A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Boston, 1969, p. 210.) Like other artists of the Kinetic and Neoconcrete movements, Camargo was captivated by the possibility of activating and representing this oneiric, ephemeral space within the physical art object. He believed this feat to be most elegantly accomplished in Brancusi’s sculpture, in particular works like Bird in Space, of which he said: “The bird in flight makes a trajectory in space. This is what really attracts me, which in spite of its immateriality is as real as the bird itself” (Sergio Camargo, quoted by Guy Brett in Sergio Camargo, Liber Albus, São Paulo, 2014, p. 246.)
By the early 1960s, Camargo had moved from the soapstone and bronze of his early work to the more pliable materials (sand, wood and plaster) favored by his contemporaries like Günther Uecker and Otto Piene working within the ZERO group and other op-kinetic, participatory artistic movements flourishing in Europe at the time. In 1963 Camargo became involved with the Paris-based Groupe de recherche d’art visuel, led by Victor Vasarely and Julio Le Parc, while maintaining close friendships with neo-concrete artists such as Hélio Oiticica based in Brazil. During this time he also met British art critic and Signals gallerist Guy Brett, who drew him to exhibit there alongside international avant-garde artists including Heinz Mack and Takis, and to whom Camargo introduced groundbreaking abstract and kinetic artists from Latin America, including Mira Schendel and Lygia Clark.
Spurred by a revelatory experience described by Guy Brett, he began building the plaster-and-wood reliefs for which he is most celebrated, and of which Relief No. 183 is an outstanding example.
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 between 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 … the combination of 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.
Like his compatriot and contemporary Lygia Clark, Camargo found a limiting device useful to give structure to his investigation of a particular visual idea. He constructed his iconic toquinhos, the foundational unit of all of his reliefs, upon the basis of this apple, with an exposed and a rounded plane, and in doing so uncovered a staggering realm of compositional possibilities. Relief No. 183 is exemplary of this freedom. The swirling patterns of the organic material from which it is constructed echo the endless swirling of the relief, which seems to explode with vibrational energy from the core of the wood itself. Where other Neoconcrete and GRAV artists turned towards collective, performative media, Camargo encourages the viewer to look inward, making our "inhabited space” visual, rendering the ephemeral tangible.
Camargo’s reliefs were included in the most important optical-kinetic exhibitions of the period, including Denise René’s Le Mouvement II and Signals’ Soundings II in 1965, as well as the International Kinetic Show at Galerie Ad Libitum and Lumière et mouvement at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1966. Through the 1960s and 70s Camargo held solo exhibitions at Signals, Gimpel Fils, Galerie Buccholz, and Galerie Gromholt in Europe, as well as the Museu de Arte Moderno in Rio, Estudio Actual in Caracas, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. Today, reliefs by the artist are held in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Tate Gallery, London, and the Musée d’art moderne nationale Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Reliefs by Sergio Camargo in Major Institutional Collections
