Amilcar de Castro
Marilia Razuk, Sao Paulo
The sculptures of Amilcar de Castro all stem from the same basic procedure of cut and fold. He mastered the technique of turning hard metal into what appeared to be mere sheets of paper, surfaces that seem almost pliable and end up that way after strenuous efforts. The strength in his work lies in fact just there, at the illusion of softness and ease created with rough steel.
His solo exhibition now at Marilia Razuk gallery presents his entire visual repertoire in the form of 140 small sculptures displayed along the walls and in the middle of a room. De Castro made three editions of this copious series, but the first two have been sold and dispersed amongst collectors. This final set, presented in its entirety, results in a striking display of his visual investigations.
Many of the small scale pieces in the gallery have become bigger public sculptures or served as starting points for large scale works the artist would create later on in his career. Much like Lygia Pape’s “Livro do Tempo”, De Castro’s cut and fold series shows the coherence underlying a whole body of work, a near obsession with constructivist strategies that gain resonance in his drawings, etchings and paintings.
While Pape, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica were his contemporaries in the neoconcrete movement, De Castro seems to have worked less in relational aesthetics and more in cerebral compositions, twisting and turning the geometric vocabulary at the base of Brazilian artistic production in the period.
And while his hard-edged sculptures tend to exhort the expressive nature of metal, his drawings and paintings, also displayed at Marilia Razuk, are powerful examples of his technique, which placed the simplicity of a line at the centre of everything.
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Untitled (Sin titulo), 1989. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Marilia Razuk Gallery, Sao Paulo/Acrílico sobre lienzo. Cortesía Galería Marilia Razuk, San Pablo.
