Sergio Camargo’s series of Relevos Brancos [White Reliefs] was initiated in 1963, in his studio in Malakoff, south of Paris. Having newly arrived in the French capital, Camargo visited Constantin Brancusi on several occasions. His interest in Brancusi catalyzed his work, which made use of the plane but did not consider it an essential object of research. At the 3rd Paris Biennial, he was awarded the International Sculpture Prize for his works in wood. The structure elaborated by his white-painted forms is full of rhythms, revealed by the incidence of light.

Camargo’s object itself is vague. There is nothing precisely defined there — no image or form. The relief does not have a clear material existence; instead, it appears dissolved in the space and light around it. It becomes simply a kind of white mold, in which the light seems to imprint its natural rhythm, to sustain the traces of each delicate transformation. In this sense, the change of light amplifies our perception of volume and planarity, and it is through these operations that Camargo experiments with some of his concepts.

His white forms are constructed almost as collages, with a pictorial logic between sculpture and painting. Hence, he spent many years working in relief (he produced his white reliefs continuously until the early 1970s, when he turned to marble). The mastery of the figure-ground relationship and the interaction of light is that of an artist who made use of objects, not that of an object creator who makes use of surface. Camargo’s reliefs do not bring with them a rejection of the visible world in favor of an ideal world; they are an amplification of the visible world. In this respect, they were a paragon of the experiments of Brazilian artists of the 1950s and 1960s whose main interest was visual ambiguity through geometry.