In April of 1964, the General Electric Institute announced a competition for the creation of the Primer Jardín de Escultura Actual, summoning artists from Uruguayan and abroad (with a certain amount of residency in the country) and with the aim of working inside of the parameters of the General Electric factory with materials, machines and skilled labor provided by that factory, which was approximately an enclosure of 100,000 square meters of prairie and fifteen kilometers from the center of the Uruguayan capital. Two foreigners participated as judges of the competition, the Italian Umbro Apollonio, director of the magazine La Biennale di Venezia, and the Brazilian writer and critic Geraldo Ferraz, a militant socialist who had worked with Oswald de Andrade in the magazine Antropofagia in the 1920s. The first prize was awarded to the Uruguayan artist Germán Cabrera for the great work he produced with scrap metal, El baño del ángel.
On his part, the French art critic Pierre Restany visited the exhibition after its opening and wrote the current essay for publication in the catalogue. He valued the exhibition as phenomenal collaborative and as a sculptural landscape in relation to an infrastructure that was industrial in nature. Something, he found was perfectly aligned with his nouveau réalisme (new realism) doctrine that, though he based his opinion on recent works created mostly by French artists, the sponsor of the works considered the project as a contemporary work of art concerning the aesthetics of industrialized societies. Particularly, in the case of this exhibition, Restany redresses the established discussion between an architectural platform for production in series and a group dispersed with elaborated pieces either using industrial scrap metal or basic handcrafted techniques. The absence of aesthetic parameters, as well as the strong presence of technical-manual and imaginative labor brings to the collective, according to the critic, “at a moral level, a very significant success”. His nouveau réalisme, its first manifesto dating four years earlier, had been precisely based on the ethical idea of “authenticity.” An idea that was derived, in turn, when the artist was confronted with new possibilities using the formal materials derived from industrialism irrespective of any previous intellectual speculation. Thus, Restany, radically departs himself from “Neo-constructivism” as an abstract-geometric trend promoted by his colleague the Italian artist Umbro Apollonio, incidentally, another judge of this exhibition.
In considering the need to modernize imaginative creativity at par with the technological processes, Restany developed an extolling discourse on the industrial civilization. He does so, particularly in regards the cultural work accomplished by General Electric in Uruguay. A country lacking an industrial infrastructure, as it had already dismantled its industrial sectors in 1964, those precarious import substitution industries that grew in the 1940s and to the middle of the 1950s.