“En palabras de Negret” is part of a longer unpublished text by Colombian cultural journalist José Hernández (b. 1955) entitled “Negret. Secretos de un itinerario.” This portion of the text consists of a series of fragments of a conversation between Hernández and Colombian sculptor Édgar Negret (1920?2012). Because the artist himself speaks in this text, it provides the reader with direct access to his ideas and reflections on a number of topics. Particularly striking are Negret’s statements about his encounter with the inner space of sculpture, that is, his description of how he came to understand that the interior at the core of a piece is as important as its exterior.
Negret and Hernández’s discussion of spatial exploration in sculpture is key to understanding a concern essential to Negret’s work. Few texts on the figure of Negret dedicate as much space as this one to the question of the “interior” and the “exterior” of the sculptural piece. Negret mentions the importance of the influence of Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (1908?2003) on his encounter with sculpture’s “inner space.” In addition to offering him advice, Oteiza introduced Negret to the work of English sculptor Henry Moore (1898?1986), who “was opening up the aesthetic hollows that form part of the sculpture itself, not the surrounding space.” Indeed, that idea would prove decisive to Negret’s future work.
In addition to the specific influences of Oteiza and Moore, Negret explains how the historical moment when he was getting his start as a sculptor was fundamental to his concern with “the inside” of things: “Every age has its concerns. In the late forties—which were decisive years for me—humanity was pursuing the spatial meaning of things. Einstein changed the world, ushering in a great mistrust of closed things. The discovery of the possibility of releasing the power of the atom had an impact on sculpture. It suddenly dawned on us that the inside of sculpture—which we had thitherto ignored—could be as rich and potent as the inside of the atom.”
“En palabras de Negret” is key to understanding Negret’s sculpture as a whole as well as one of its most important characteristics: a balanced approach to sculptural space. It is striking that the artist himself explains how he came to formulate these issues and what led him to tackle them in his art.