This text by Cuban artist and writer Galaor Carbonell (1938?92) is important to understanding the work of Colombian sculptor Édgar Negret (1920?2012). It addresses Negret’s stay in New York from 1948 to 1950, a moment that would prove essential to his work. While in that city, Negret discovered the possibility of working with non-traditional materials, among them wire, industrial waste, sheets of aluminum and of stainless steel. The text emphasizes how important the chance circumstance of his time in New York would prove to be. In Carbonell’s view, “the dominant Colombian artistic mentality of that time could not conceive of making sculpture beyond the strict limits of the two traditional techniques: modeling and carving.”
Negret’s connection to the Clay Club Sculpture Center—a place conducive to artistic experimentation—and the experience of living in a city where speed, machinery, industry, and modernization were daily realities entailed immersion in materials directly linked to a world new to him. Carbonell asserts that “the aesthetic ideas underlying the revolution in contemporary sculpture demanded a system where cause-effect relations were more direct, allowing sculpture to benefit from certain industrial techniques and to make use of materials with great expressive potential.” Negret is indisputably one of the first artists from Latin America whose work partook of this new system.
This text not only addresses Negret’s encounter with those new materials, but also how they required the artist to tackle new aesthetic ideas and to seek new theories. In order to use materials that, from the perspective of traditional sculpture, were lacking in “nobility,” Negret had to assign artistic functions to any object he happened to choose. In this process lies the origin of Negret’s determination to strike a balance between concept and form, between what the artist was experiencing as an individual and how he embodied it in his work. This text, then, demonstrates how the New York period changed not only Negret’s way of working and material production, but also his thought process and way of formulating his relationship to art and the world.