The Austrian critic and art historian Walter Engel wrote the article “La Poesía de la Chatarra” [The Poetry of Scrap Metal] that appeared in El Espectador on October 4, 1964, on the occasion of the second solo exhibition of sculpture by Feliza Bursztyn. The article sought to explain abstract sculpture and claimed that it involved a transformation of material such as that wrought by classical sculptors who worked with marble. Engel also disputed the Pop Art label that had been attached to Feliza Burstyn’s work by many critics at the time. He changed his mind when he saw her latest work, after her first exhibition of scrap metal sculpture in 1961 failed to “convince him,” because he saw in it none of the “transformational process, the metamorphosis” that he considered essential.  

This is the second article written by the Viennese art critic and historian Walter Engel (1908–2005) about the Polish-born Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982), and this time he is moved to express a change of opinion regarding her work. The change is immediately apparent in the title of the article, “La Poesía de la Chatarra” [The Poetry of Scrap Metal], in which the critic indicates that there is now a poetic interpretation involved, a transformation of the material, an intense thought process that inspired the creation of the sculpture. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what he saw in the works exhibited in 1961 at the El Callejón gallery.  

By using the word poetry, Engel makes a distinction between Bursztyn’s work and contemporary attitudes which saw scrap metal sculpture as poor substitutes for North American Pop Art because most of them were made with automobile parts. At this exhibition, however (presented in 1964 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá) Bursztyn’s sculpture was made of Nescafé cans. Her critics argued that it made no sense to create Pop Art in a country like Colombia, where there was no consumer society, nor even a large population. Some critics even saw her works as a reference to the Campbell’s soup cans painted by Andy Warhol (1928–1987). But Bursztyn used Nescafé cans because they were all she had and she had no money to buy scrap metal. She actually found a whole roomful of those cans at the home of the Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona (1927–2007), and used them to create the works that were shown in the exhibition that Engel reviewed. Engel wrote that he now perceived a change as part of the process, a transformation of the material, and not just simply a collection of objects taken from a market and shown in a museum.