In this text, Ronaldo Brito analyzes Amilcar de Castro’s work in the media of sculpture and drawing. He discusses the connections between de Castro’s production and modern sculpture. Brito asserts that de Castro’s art formulates a rejection of the idea of the monument. He defines de Castro’s poetics as “the drama of the heretofore,” and states that his sculpture constitutes an exhaustive questioning of the problem of space insofar as it makes the viewer aware of its contemporary dimension and of the nonexistence of a complete world as well as the unstable nature of “the real.” The paradoxical appearance of de Amilcar’s sculpture, which consists of “bent” metal, is the result of a transitory and transparent gesture in relation to a thick and resistant material. Brito also explains the temporal dimension of sculpture, revealing that space is necessarily alive with the vital pulse of life. The sphere of the daily is a terrain of expansion, rather than dissolution, in Amilcar de Castro’s art. Matter is integrated into the social by means of reason insofar as it is forced to internalize its distance and secret. The sculpture of de Amilcar therefore combines a spirit of elegance (the project) and the visual baroque (the invisible curve of movement). Brito asserts that de Castro does not attempt to effect the dissolution of the art object; his work refuses to be either a mimetic “double” or a “logical model.” In the end, it entails neither commentary nor parenthesis; art is an integral and constituent part of a reality that cannot be tamed or formalized by any discourse.

Ronaldo [Correia de] Brito (b. 1951), from the state of Ceará, is one of the most important and influential art critics active in Brazil today. His essays have been published in books, journals, and exhibition catalogues. A founder of the magazines Malasartes and Gávea, he is a regular contributor to the newspaper Opinião. In the seventies, Brito was a leading figure in the re-assessment of the Neo-Concrete movement and its legacy for contemporary art from Brazil.

In this text, Brito assesses the sculpture of Amilcar de Castro (1920–2002) who he believed was able to use form to formulate the dilemmas of art and of the contemporary world. This text has much in common with an essay by Brito first published in the book Camargo (São Paulo: Edições Akagawa, 1990), and then in Sérgio Camargo (São Paulo: Cosac and Naify, 2000). In the view of art critic Rodrigo Naves, Brito looks to artists from earlier generations in an attempt to find new paradigms for Brazilian art. His aim is to reflect on models capable of formulating an experience unfettered by no longer-relevant rhetoric regarding the oneness of life and art characteristic of Neo-Concrete splitting in works by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. 

Art critic Ferreira Gullar asserts that although Amilcar de Castro’s art entails exceedingly rigorous “geometry,” it indisputably operates on Neo-Concretism. Regarding this, see “Esculturas de Amilcar de Castro” [doc. no. 1091573].