Page 48 - Studio International - September 1967

by the observer's own movement and is strictly control- knows modern sculpture. He has come under various
lable. However it was to the quality of steel as a plane, as influences and it would be easy to play at spotting them.
in Calder, rather than to its tensile quality as in Gonzales, Of the admirations he himself admits to, one seems parti-
that Negret turned in New York. Steeliness, as such, cularly revealing, his admiration for the architect Gaudi.
seems to be of little interest to Negret; in spite of the Although it is fourteen years since he went to Barcelona,
prominence he gives to rivets that join the sheets, the this influence seems fully apparent only in the recent
medium seems only a convenient method of enclosing work. Gaudi made Negret realize the importance of
space in the way he wants and might conceivably be repetition in a work of art, leading to the imposition of the
replaced by another, as it has recently by aluminium. In artist's will on the spectator. Analysis of his recent works
Mallorca, where he went in 1953, Negret found a number show that they are constructed out of a very small
of artists working in metal and glass. He attempted to number of basic shapes, so arranged that they follow a
use the same combination, but finding it unsatisfactory visual sequence. They qualify, in fact, as kinetic because
he began to paint his metal in an effort to reach the it is impossible to see them except as forms in movement.
result he had been aiming at. The language he developed For Negret this impression is essential, as he feels the
in the late fifties is like a signal language. The steel, bent material aspect of his work is becoming less important, or
only in a single plane, assumes multiform arms, slots and important only as a taking-off point. In spite of the static,
brackets, and is punctuated by discs of clear orange or material-seeming nuts and bolts the forms open out and
red, like warning lights, the kind of chromatic contrast seem to soar or to float. Some of the floating kind,
that he would presumably have liked to execute in glass. possibly not so wholly successful, are designed to project
Many of the pieces he called Aparato Magico, and the sideways from the wall. Several of these recent pieces
title is evidence of Negret's iconography at that period. have titles suggestive of space travel—Navigator, or Cape
These earlier chromatic pieces seem to suffer from an Kennedy. Negret owns to having always been interested
undue elaboration of profiles, as though Negret was in the religious content of art. In 1951 he even executed a
attempting to compensate for the primitive construction semi-abstract Christ in steel and matted wire. But the
in depth. They do take a kind of integrity from the religious content of his present work is far less explicit,
acceptance of a primitive industrial technique, and are perhaps seen only in the aspiration these forms express.
as remote as possible from cast sculpture. But the develop- His Navigators are vehicles of escape from chaos. Negret is
ment from this series of pieces to the work he showed at conscious of the parallel with his pre-Colombian pre-
São Paolo in 1965, and in Edinburgh in 1967, is surely decessors, seeing their attitude as an inspired escapismo,
one of the most remarkable in the history of recent art. and with mediæval man's escapism through religion. He
Technically, it is based on his use of aluminium and his would like to think of his sculptures as a kind of modern
ability to bend it far more freely and in more than one angels, in his own words 'unselfish instruments for
plane—although in fact he uses this ability sparingly and escaping'.
the convoluted appearance of his recent pieces is largely Negret's first admiration in modern sculpture was for
an optical effect. Ideologically, the development is based Henry Moore, and it is interesting that almost his last
on a much deeper visual symbolism, leaving behind the words to the writer were also of Moore. Wide separated
rather primitive reverence for industrial artifacts with though his work now is from Moore's, Negret has a
rivetted angles. The new works suddenly speak a far more profound admiration for the increasing depth and scale
universal language of aspirations and fears. The rivets or of Moore's later sculpture. At 47 he himself still has some
nuts and bolts, however, remain to remind one of the way to go, but the strength and integrity of his recent
origins. work is so great that we may be sure that Negret has not
Negret is a perceptive and visually curious man who made his final contribution to international sculpture. q