In the mid-1960s, Camargo began to experiment with carrara marble. It was only in the 1970s that he began to use marble almost exclusively in decisively sculptural works. On the one hand, this material, with strong roots in the sculptural tradition, accentuates the permanence and stability of the works. On the other hand, the smooth and uniform surface of polished marble reacts more effectively to the effects of light, intensifying the dynamic and transitory aspect of the set.

Camargo returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1974, but maintained a studio in Massa Carrara, Italy, until the end of his life. With elongated pieces in Noir Belge stone, produced in the 1980s, the artist radically experiments with the limits of form by making increasingly sharp cuts, threatening the physical integrity of the material. He reaches the extreme point of possible coexistence between order and its dissolution. According to critics, these works add a certain dramatic connotation to Sérgio Camargo's unique constructivism.


The possibility of combining, in a coherent and concise manner, a restricted number of geometric volumes (cylinders, cubes, rectangles), without being accountable to a didactic rationality, gives Camargo's method a permanent experimental character throughout his work. Such experimentalism, with all due differences, places him alongside artists such as Lygia Clark (1920-1988), Mira Schendel (1919-1988), and Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Even guided by the constructive principle of integral coherence and lucidity, Camargo's work does not abandon the páthos of adventure characteristic of modern lyricism, as Ronaldo Brito also observes.


Many of these smaller format marble sculptures were made to help visualise several large scale works for public spaces. These included: the structural wall of the Palace of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasilia; the Triptych of the Bank of Brazil in New York; the column Homenagem a Brancusi, for the Faculty of Medicine in Bourdeaux, France; a sculpture in Praça da Sé, in São Paulo; and a monument for the Catacumba Park in Rio de Janeiro.