É pau / É pedra - Sergio / Camargo

The visual artist thinks through the eyes; the world reaches him through his eyes, just as, I believe that the musician thinks through the ears and structures his life, his relationship with the world, through sound, through hearing. The visual artist, or myself in any case, connects to the world through the vision he has of it. Now, what do I look at, what do I see, how do I feel the things that surround me, what things do I feel? All of this, in the end, is revealed through the work.” — Sergio Camargo

A stick, a stone...

Sergio Camargo is a giant of Brazilian contemporary art. His body of work created a sculptural language of its own, capable of making visible the intimate architecture of light - a rigorously structured way of thinking that resonates, in exemplary fashion, with Brasília's modernist spirit and with Oscar Niemeyer's poetic geometry. In proposing this exhibition for the capital, I considered both the influence of Brasília's geometric forms on his poetics and the impact of Camargo's work on the imagination of those who conceived the city - from Niemeyer to Lucio Costa and Athos Bulcão. It is an encounter between architecture: that of the urban space and that of vision.

Within the Latin American tradition, there is a geometric and kinetic lineage that traces back to Iberian formation and to the Arab legacy in the Peninsula - a persistence of patterns, cuts and tessellations that endured across centuries and resurfaced in modernism, kinetic art, and contemporary investigations. For Camargo, this memory takes shape in a concise, economical vocabulary that makes the cylinder his essential phoneme. By arriving at the cylinder, he arrived at the economy of form: an alphabet for all the possibilities of light. His reliefs, blocks and cylindrical constellations do not describe objects; they describe incidences - the ways in which light touches, shadow draws, and emptiness acquires weight.

Another decisive gesture in his formation is the cut - an action learned in proximity to Lucio Fontana's experiments in Buenos Aires and transposed, by Camargo, into a field of his own. In his work, the cut does not wound the material: it brings forth the light contained within it. Between face and fissure, between surface and interval, it is the cut that institutes space as visible time. That is why I call Camargo a “calligrapher of sticks and stones”: he writes with matter, and his calligraphy is a syntax of edges and breaths.

This exhibition is the most comprehensive dedicated to the artist in decades. It proposes a journey through Camargo's work and thought, and through his affinities with Brasília's luminous architecture. The title É pau, é pedra… [A stick, a stone…] immediately summons the cadence of Brazilian culture: the enumeration of elemental materials. Just as Jobim, in “Águas de Março”, condensed an emotional landscape of the country into language, Camargo summons those same fundamental elements - wood, stone - to reveal the essence of form and light.

Between modernity and tradition, between constructive rigour and a surface-level lyricism, Camargo's work establishes an ethic of clarity. His research concerns the splendour that emerges in the exercise of experimentation, and how to allow the minimum to say the maximum; how to allow matter - without ornament - to become a luminous event. This rigour of rejecting, of knowing when to stop, of recognising, is the synthesis of what the hand can translate from the mind's ideas.

Camargo belongs to the generation in which Brazil believed radically in the future - when the visual arts, architecture, music and literature formed a creative constellation without parallel - he was one of its pivots. His legacy is not only the beauty of reliefs and volumes, but also a pedagogy of the gaze: learning to see the economy of the essential, the ethics of the cut, the intelligence of the hand, the subtlety of light.

É pau, é pedra… [A stick, a stone…] reactivates the relevance of Sergio Camargo in the present. At a moment where we are saturated with images, his work reminds us that less is not a lack of: it is precision. Between order and organicity, his work offers a grammar for thinking form and, with it, the very idea of public and shared space. At the end of the journey, we hope visitors leave with a renewed measure of vision - one in which matter, for a moment, returns to the origin.

Marcello Dantas, Curator.