Sergio Camargo

Sergio Camargo was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, and began his art education under Lucio Fontana and Emilio Pettoruti at the Academia Altamira in Buenos Aires. Moving to Paris, Camargo came under the influence of Gaston Bachelard, his philosophy professor at the Sorbonne, Constantin Brancusi, his close friend and mentor, and Henri Laurens, the French sculptor and illustrator.

Camargo believed that Brancusi’s sculpture Bird in Space was the most elegant figurative sculpture of the time. He is quoted saying: ‘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’(1). Camargo sought to develop Brancusi’s concerns in his own practice, bypassing representation entirely to explore the dynamic potential of volume inherent in basic geometric forms.

He dissected this notion through his series of modular polychrome wooden reliefs, formed of backboards studded with painted wooden dowels. Experimenting with the direction, scale and concentration of the dowels, he simultaneously probes the endless possibilities of geometric compositions and articulates different kinetic effects, with reliefs variably suggesting gentle undulations or frenzied movement across their surfaces. They at once carry the logical clarity and man-made precision of minimalist sculpture, and evoke myriad natural forms including crystals, corals, cumulous clouds, animal teeth, or long grass rushing in the wind. Guy Brett, who, from the 1960s onwards, wrote extensively on Camargo’s developing career, indulged in these comparisons to nature throughout his edition of Signals magazine dedicated to the sculptor in 1964-5.

The present work, one of a minority mounted to a dark wooden base, offers an additional level of contrast between the natural and the crafted, the raw material of the wood and the purity of the white paint. Against other examples by the artist, the work possesses a relative softness, with its low relief, the broad planes of the wider dowels and the organic irregularity of the composition.

Regarding Camargo’s interrogations into volume and space, Brett encourages a reading of the work only secondarily as a sculptural form, and primarily as a base for studies of light, ‘a kind of white mould into which light seems to imprint its natural rhythm; it bears the traces of each slight transformation as clean morning light changes to plain afternoon light and later to elusive evening light. It is not there to tell us anything but to return, amplified, what we bring to it… The white solids are not felt as solids; the shadows and relations are felt, more strongly, and these are the immaterial traces of the element’s volume. Volume, in Camargo's reliefs, though in reality it exists, is perceived as virtual' (2).

“To see the work of art as something receptive, no longer autonomous, runs right through modern art, with Malevich’s White on White canvas, Brancusi’s reflecting volumes, Schwitters’ Merz-column, Vantongerloo’s prisms, Moholy-Nagy’s Light-space modulator, Yves Klein’s ‘traces’ of natural forces. If you were to follow Camargo’s work from its beginning to the white reliefs he is making today, you would see a process in which the static volume of traditional sculpture has been gradually disintegrated. You would follow his exploration of the language of modern art in terms of his own experience, as he gradually evolved his own structure” (3).


1 Sergio Camargo, quoted in Guy Brett, Sergio Camargo: Liber Albus (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2014) p. 246.
2 Guy Brett, Sergio Camargo: Light and Shadow (São Paolo: Arauco Editoria, 2007), p. 23.
3 Guy Brett, “Sculpture by Camargo at Gimpel Fils until June 8,” Studio International 175 (June 1968): p. 316.