“Untitled”

An important representative of the Concrete and Neoconcrete movements in the 1950s and 1960s, Willys de Castro was a painter, engraver, designer, set designer, costume designer, and graphic artist. He participated in important exhibitions such as the 4th, 6th, and 24th São Paulo Biennials, the 1st Neoconcrete Art Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the 2nd Biennial of Young People at the Musée d'Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris, among others. In addition, his works are part of collections such as the Contemporary Art Museum Collection of the University of São Paulo, the Modern Art Museum Collection of São Paulo, and the Raquel Arnaud Art Office Collection.

He worked with geometric elements and colors in order to explore volume in the two-dimensional plane. His questions about the plane as a space for creation led him to create the "Active Objects" , three-dimensional objects in which the artist also tensions colors, shapes and space, and decades later, the "Pluriobjetos", in which he began to use different materials and explore movement.

As Maria Alice Milliet points out: "While the exhaustion of the real and virtual potentialities of the plane leads Clark and Oiticica to definitively abandon painting, Hércules Barsotti never stops painting, while Willys de Castro lingers for a long time in a borderline zone between the painting and the object. Knowledgeable of the issues inherent to painting, he dedicates himself, as a double agent would, to thoroughly exploring the various sides of the problem. Aware that a visual event, even restricted to the plane, is never exhausted in a single reading, he uses minimal interference to induce the eye to travel across the surface from one edge to the other, noticing flaws and slippages, in order to gestally reconstruct the composition. Through small openings and large leaks, he suggests the continuity of the painting beyond the rectangle of the painting. The overflow of paint to the side of the support and from there to its back, a 180-degree turn, strength and recovery of thickness, essential to the volume: in the sheet perpendicular to the wall, what in the painting was the side becomes the front and verse disappears. The emphasis on the frontality of what was originally a profile ends up reducing the object to a lath where small cuts and displacements interfere. The painting finally vacates the small space and, against the wall, what remains are bundles of wood or strips of metal. Step by step, through discreet and consequent actions, Willys de Castro forms his artistic thought, which equates his work, methodologically, to a research work."

1. Rediscovery Exhibition, 2000, São Paulo, SP. Modern Art. São Paulo: São Paulo Biennial Foundation: Brazil Association 500 Years of Visual Arts, 2000. p.54.