Edgar Negret

The sculptor, born in Popayán, Department of Cauca, in 1920, introduced modern sculpture in Colombia with his mythical sculptures featuring a magical symmetry, a play of space in permanent metamorphosis, the use of aluminum sheets, screws and nuts, and a supernatural palette that fuses with a perpetu- al reflection on the past and the present, characterized by the fact that the recovery of Pre-Hispanic themes avoids the ‘indigenist’ exoticism. Thus, his flowers, cascades, suns, moons and stars, butterflies, temples, bridges, masks, water bodies, or eclipses in metallic blue, red and yellow shapes emerge.

A baroque spirit born of Baroque, his sculptures convey a sort of silent resonance: they are machines that stop time, unique objects in the desert of trivialities. A body of work made of intuitions that gradually resulted in that mythical place in space, linked to a private life in which, like Rilke, the artist learned from the silence and solitude in the shelter of his studio to unveil the mystery of life. There, where the universe is enclosed in a mythical box, the sculptor − heir to Praxiteles, to the cathedrals stone carvers, to the Pre-Columbian goldsmiths − works in the silence of stone or of cold aluminum, and leaves behind as his legacy new stones for a lunar landscape.

Each sculpture bears in itself the mechanics of myth transformed into a poetics of the aesthetic, where the elements utilized − nuts, metal sheets, color − transcend them- selves to become that other thing, evoked by the artist with the stubborn certainty of the person who screws a piece of eternity onto the infinite. For everything in Negret is a yearning for the beautiful and a fulfillment through beauty. Yet this beauty is the result of numerous experiences implying revelations: the mechanical elements discovered in his travels to New York, where his native, colonial environment clashed with the metropolis par excellence of the 20th century; his meetings with the Basque sculptors, who carry in their hands the traces of a very antique universe; the Navajo rituals of painting with sand, among many others that occurred until his discovery of the Andean scaffolding, of his Inca lineage. In this vast ritual − of initiation into other worlds as much as of introspective immersion − Negret undertakes a learning process that leads him to reelaborate all the mortar of experience and to discover a raison d’être and a way of sculpting that finds its culmination in cultural and aesthetic crossbreeding.