Sergio Camargo (1930-1990)

Galerie Europe, Paris
Galleri Gromholt, Oslo acquired 1968
Mr. Per Lindblom, Oslo
Private Collection, Scandinavia

Oslo, Kunstnernes Hus, Op-kunst, March 30-April 28, 1968

The panel is in excellent condition considering its age. The panel is clean and the paint is tightly bound. All of the painted dowels are accounted for. Minor soiling can be seen on the outside edges of the panel. The paint is thinly applied on numerous areas revealing the grain of the wood below. This uneven hand in the paint's application is an intended affect of the artist which gives the panel a "painterly" quality. Minor breaks in the paint layer can be seen around the bottom of the dowels where they come in contact with the panel. These tiny cracks in the paint are a result of dimensional movement in the wood and characteristic of aged wood. These cracks are stabile and do not require treatment. The panel is structurally sound. No damage was noted on sculpture. This condition report has been provided courtesy of Wilson Conservation.
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Although a seminal part of Brazil's mid-century abstract movement, Sergio Camargo's most influential teacher was the Argentine painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana. In 1946, Camargo entered the Academia Privada de Altamira in Buenos Aires as a student of the avant-garde school's founder, Fontana. Camargo was only sixteen at the time. During this same year, Fontana, along with other pupils and professors, published the Manifesto Blanco—a call for the end of art as it was known up to that point and instead promoting the production of art as a spontaneous production between the unconscious and the organic materials at hand. Fontana eventually returned to Italy in 1947. Simultaneously, a new generation of Brazilian artists including Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, and Abraham Palatnik, among others, concentrated on propelling the Constructivist and Neo-Constructivist movements.[1].

Sergio Camargo had developed his own complex, sensorial language by the time he relocated to Paris in 1961, never becoming a devout follower of Fontana's Manifesto or of the Constructivist consciousness. It is in the series of the wood-cone Reliefs that came to dominate his oeuvre by the 1960s where his use of materials and light came to full development. The parallel interplay of light, volume, tactility, logic, chaos, rigidity, the organic, the human and the extra-human reaches an ultimate example in Hommage à Fontana, 1967.

The concentration of the wood cones in Hommage à Fontana creates the illusion of a methodical placement that in the meanwhile has created abrupt eruptions throughout the work's surface. Under light, the varying sizes of the cones become, as Camargo wrote, "versatile spontaneous rhythms/active shadows, rigid presences/lyric surfaces, skin cadence."[2] The most provocative element of this work, is the slash itself. Just as Fontana introduced the slashes, Tagli, to create an added and infinite dimension in his canvases, Camargo's slash is a similar achievement. It is this slash that is the Hommage of the pupil to his master; the last gesture of intuition that fulfills Fontana's conception of material space: "an act of faith in the Infinite, the affirmation of spirituality."[3]

[1] Maria Alice Milliet, "From Concretist Paradox to Experimental Exercise of Freedom," Brazil: Body & Soul, New York, 2001, p. 391
[2] Sergio Camargo, Preciosas coisas vas fundamentais. Escritos do Sergio Camargo, São Paolo, 2010, pp. 28-9
[3] Paulo Campiglio, "I Only Believe in Art," Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, p. 201, New York, p. 201