The urgency of re-valuating the legacy of Negret, pioneer of Colombian abstract geometric art

In the early 1950s, while residing in New York, he worked in sculptures manufactured with welded wires and metal sheets, which still retained a type of referential representation. It was in Paris that he made Señal for an aquarium, using metal tubes of various calibers, some contained within others, which, as pointed out by critic Álvaro Medina, created “a chamber whose inner space was as active as the outer one”. In any case, this piece was the precedent for his memorable series Aparatos mágicos. Industrially manufactured with folded and polychrome wood and aluminum sheets, the screws were visible with the express intention of showing their connection with the machines of modernity, yet the works had an organic structure, obtained on the basis of the modular design, for Negret sought the effect of a form emerging from another. Nevertheless, they also contained an opposite dimension: the magical element, which implied a search for forms connected to the archetype of transcendence. In fact, this series originated while he was living in New York for the second time, enveloped in a metropolis which was in itself a gigantic machine moved by the money that dragged its inhabitants to a race for survival and in the face of which he thought art as a resource of salvation: “a repertoire of mythological resources with which man could face aggressiveness and his own dangers … the mythology in question was made with the elements taken from the physical landscape of New York", he once explained.

Concerning his artifacts, critic Walter Engel wrote that they synthesized "the essence of the images, of the ideas, of the facts that move our time, configured with these geometric elements [...] the artifacts thus born are then developed with the most exclusive aesthetic aim. Free from all mechanic or practical function, they become "magical" thanks to the abstract play of the pure forms", as stated at that time by critic Walter Engel.

However, as is also the case of other Colombian abstract artists –Carlos Rojas, Ramírez Villamizar, Omar Rayo, Germán Botero or Manolo Vellojín, for example − Negret’s work has not been included in the major exhibitions of geometric abstraction. This absence responds, in part, to the fact that in the development of this movement, Colombian artists worked in isolation, without ever producing those manifestos which brought the Argentinean, the Uruguayans, the Brazilians or the Venezuelans together. And on the other hand, almost all of them committed what their contemporary geometric artists constituted a sin: they maintained links between form and reality, without renouncing all referential function, as the latter did. Curiously, the new generations of geometric artists are turning their eye to the connection between abstraction and life.

In the last ten years of his existence, Alzheimer’s disease prevented master Negret from continuing a production which, in any case, opened the local scenario to the international universe. Artist and critic Félix Ángel evoked Negret’s friendship with Louise Nevelson and Ellsworth Kelly and their contribution to the process of modernism in Colombia.

Nevertheless, many of Negret’s public sculptures have been abandoned by the cities which should be the custodians of the legacy of one of the greatest Colombian artists of the 20th century. In a commemorative note published in El mundo newspaper of Medellín, journalist Juan Esteban Agudelo Restrepo denounced the state of deterioration of the work El sol, at José María Córdova airport of Rionegro, Antioquia. May the artist’s death mark the beginning of a process of re-valuation of his legacy which may allow not only to save his public work but also to contribute to a much needed re-writing of the history of art.