The grounds to build and consolidate all diversity and strength of what we now call contemporary Brazilian art were launched by the generation of artists to which Amilcar de Castro belongs. He created the neoconcrete group along with Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape and Franz Weissmann, among other artists, em-bodying the emergence of procedures, solutions and inventions that, in the whole of constructive movements, lead the visual arts of the time to a climax.

Castro’s work gathers a plural uni-verse of creations: its primary matter for sculpting was corten steel, but he also used wood, marble, granite and glass. A pupil of Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Castro was an obsessive draftsman, having made thousands of graphic works throughout his life. Drawing was always an exercise of inscription on the plane of possibility for its autonomous launching into the three-dimensional space — his sculp-ture can also be thought of, first and foremost, as drawing, because what it does is to physically realize the fate of his drawing.

His great sculptural invention was his constructive method called cut and fold, which consists of, starting from a plan, inscribing a shape and launch-ing it into space in three dimensions through a very simple operation of literally cutting and folding the plan, without the use of welding or any other technical device.

This method — revolutionary in the history of sculpture — can be applied to a sheet of paper as well as to an iron plate several inches thick and with many tons in weight. The work of Amilcar de Castro breaks with the constructivist formalist orthodoxy, establishing a unique poetics around his work.