Amilcar de Castro is part of the group of Neo-concrete artists and, as such, his experience has its origin in the Concretist aesthetic, which he more deeply investigates. From that stage of questions and studies, Amilcar retained some general and positive characteristics: the desire for simplicity, for defined structures, for direct expression. On the other hand, he rejected the quantitative notion of the shape, so to speak, which is translated into serial construction, into the composition of elements, adding one to another. And if he rejected it, it was because this analytical way of facing the structure leads to a contradictorily intellectualized and optical language: given the exterior manner in which the shape is conceived, the artist has to use visual effects to lend dynamics to it. Amilcar descends to a concept prior to the shape to surprise it in its birthplace and capture it at its birth. He can, with apparently simple elements – a rectangular plate – reveal a dramatic experience of the shape, the conflict of the form that wants to be born and establish itself in the comfort of our perception, and of the force that, at the same time, requests the opposite, and of the gesture that both causes the explosion and hinders it. Amilcar’s sculptures want to explode, and the explosion is latent in the virtual movement of the plate that wants to unfold and shrink, of the surface that, with a living force, rises from the ground and is immobilized at the brink of a new movement that is never precipitous. His shapes are monumental without being rhetorical; they are heavy without having mass; they are dramatic without resorting to any conventional dramatic figure.

(In Módulo 22, April 1961)