It is not the haughty sails that propel the ship but the invisible wind.
(By, W. M. D.)
Work
Hairs of Defeat (series)
The Circus (series)
Wayuu Culture Tribute (series)
Of the Waters and the Skies (series)
Monumental (series)
What People Are Saying
Of the Waters and the Skies: Birds, Fish and Ships.
The work of Camargo Vilardy is a triad in which beings from the sky (birds), beings from the water (fishes) and the marine meridian of above and below (the boat) are conjugated.
Expressed in a language of spiritual orientation that does not reproduce external forms, but instead created with intensity from within, from a spherical or oval visual gravity, where the origins or convergences of the entire composition occur, such as the march towards the center of one, as the artist says. They are the concepts that art complements reality, to transfer a state of the soul to the observer.
The boat expresses the vehicle which allows us to go to the other shore. Getting on the boat is daring to dream to cross the ocean of existence.
Birds in their flight, symbolize lightness, freedom, the higher states of being and the desire for sublimation.
The fish is associated with revelation, with life, with fertility.
These sculptural creations of wood and metal, representing birds that are also from the water and fish that are also from the air, merge with a view of the boat, to make the journey into the interior of the .being and explore ourselves in the universal order.
— Gina Moran. Cuadernos de Reflexión. Universidad de Zulia, August 2000.
Critical Review
His interests in sculpture have led him to cultivate the figurative and the abstract in small and large format, being the author of monumental works found in various public and private spaces in Barranquilla and the Colombian Caribbean. In that trade the motives and themes assumed were different: The life of the circus, the pre-Hispanic universe, the body and the dance, the violence, the spiritual world of the Wayuu culture of the Colombian Guajira the exquisite abstract figures like birds and fish and illusory machines.
Different are also the materials that Camargo uses for the expression of his plastic ideas. Bronze, steel, wrought iron and wood lend their substance to this artist who delivers in his creations the delicate balance of sensitivity and reason with which his work has always been characterized. And that largely explains a personal aesthetic that has its deepest essence in the poetry of forms and volume.
In this sample of the Customs Gallery circumscribed in its entirety to its production of abstract figures in bronze and wood we can fully dimension the imagination, creativity and technique of this Colombian artist in possession, at least, of a poetic engineering with which we Surprise and fascinate.
— Miguel Iriarte (Poet), 2002 Director of the Art Gallery “La Aduana” Barranquilla - Colombia
The Poetic Sculpture of Carlos Camargo Vilardy
Throughout his life, Carlos Camargo, have had two equally creative vocations: the visual arts, and in them the predominance of sculpture, although he also does not forget painting, and teaching. He has known how to combine them teaching art, and not only teaching it, but exercising constant practice with his numerous disciples. In the field of sculpture, and in opposition to the classics of mass sculpture, such as Henry Moore or Auguste Rodin, the work of Camargo Vilardy is a poetic fabric of symbolic images representing fish or birds. Nor does he forget abstraction without specific references, rather finding in these figures the essence of a form that can be what the observer imagines. To achieve its end, it uses metals such as brushes, steel, wrought iron and the wood from which it extracts its fine texture and those grains that add up to make a totality imbued with imagination. Proposing geometry where ovals, spheres and spirals converge, it contrasts the emptiness with the solidity to draw in the space sensations of water or air, reminiscent of musical harmonies.
They are open shapes that reveal his anatomy in elegant lines that surprise by the balance of his compositions. His sculpture, as well as his painting, is part of the artistic side of minimalism, which recommends simplicity as a resource to create complex images, subjecting metal to the designs of its aesthetic intention, to achieve those fish that glide in space. As for its sea, or those birds that take flight with the flapping of wings, it is only the product of an artist committed, in a radical way, with his vocation to build visual alternatives to the figures so often repeated in the collective imagination.
Technique: -Bronze
Dimensions: H.11” x L.5” x W.7”
Year: 2012