Sandu Darie is considered one of the foremost revolutionary Concrete artists of his generation who, with this lot, provides us with a brilliant example of one of his moving and transformable structures. This work clearly emulates his conceptual boldness and is a masterful model for the way in which, as the Cuban intellectual Marcelo Pogolotti aptly stated, “Darie made all of his work a sort of laboratory where ideas, sentiments, and technology met and merged, attuned to universal aesthetic postulates and motivated, like many of his contemporaries, by the possibility of applying them to artistic creation” (E. Vega Dopico, “Cuban Geometric Art: A Reason to Evoke Poetry” in Pulses of Abstraction in Latin America: The Ella Fontanals- Cisneros Collection, Madrid: Turner Libros, p. 70). In addition to having the characteristic components attributed to Concrete art—a combination of basic visual features such as planes, primary colors, and form—Untitled is also imbued with geometric rigor reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticism. Its movable components also exemplify the profound influence which the MADÍ movement had on the artist. Initiated in Argentina by Gyula Kosice in 1946—with whom Darie developed a friendship and series of correspondences starting in 1949—MADÍ was characterized by a focus on the concrete and physical reality of art. MADÍ artists sought to play and rupture with the traditional conventions of painting, often producing irregular shaped canvases or structures with moving parts, characteristics which this lot illustrates.
In this sculpture, Darie combines his painstaking interest in space, light, and color and invites the viewer to take part in the modification of the compositional elements: when one component is lifted or moved another strikingly bold arrangement is revealed. The work transforms into at least seven different forms, ridding any possibility of passive observation. Instead, his invitation for the viewer to participate in the motion, perspective, and movement of the work reinforces Darie’s conviction of art’s social function—a cunning response and counter to the view that abstract art was alien to social reality. In this way, Darie’s Untitled undoubtedly illustrates and defines the theoretical scope and artistic originality of the twentieth century Latin American avant-garde that defined geometric and Concrete abstraction.
