Untitled 2000

Amilcar de Castro made this sculpture of two leaning planes with large slabs of rusted metal, sometime in the last half of the twentieth century, but with no specific date. The way the rust forms a skin, a layer over the steel, is like the history of the piece made visible. The sculpture sits on the ground, with the trees behind, as if to say: everything changes over time. Look at the marks on the planes; they have a quality that is sort of there, and sort of not there. It’s like the ghost of a mark. I’m thinking about Richard Serra, who also worked with large scale metal forms. Yet, while Serra’s works are more about line and how the planes relate to each other, these planes are about surface and the way they absorb the atmosphere around them. It is nice how artists can be connected but really different.