TABLE PAINTING

Sergio de Castro painted his Table works by setting out simple and everyday objects on a surface. Personal items that surrounded the artist in his studio, these objects – both trivial and vital in nature – reveal a little of his daily life and allow us to enter into his private sphere. The still lifes speak to us about a person we do not see, evoking the owner of the objects in a manner reminiscent of the artist Arman’s Portrait-robot works.

As such, Sergio de Castro has given us a glimpse of his life in the studio. The artist settled permanently at 16 bis Rue du Saint-Gothard in the 14th arrondissement of Paris in 1953, in a studio that had been occupied by Paul Gauguin, among others.

Sergio de Castro met many artists, including Picasso – whom he got to know both in Paris and in the South of France, where he spent time in the summer – and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. The latter even had works by Sergio de Castro in her personal collection.

Like Henri Matisse, Sergio de Castro showed a perfect mastery of colour in his still life paintings. Like Giorgio Morandi, he developed variations on everyday objects.

CHAIR PAINTINGS

Colour has played an essential role in the composition of Sergio de Castro’s still lifes thanks to his choice of brightly coloured Canson paper. The colour of the paper became the colour of the composition’s background, as well as the colour of certain objects defined by their contours alone. As such, the artist explored the idea of fullness and emptiness, the space in reserve playing a role as important as the solid colour planes. The colour in his works is exuberant, becoming light, colour, surface and form all at once.

Objects are not represented in a realistic way but rather rendered geometric in form, to the extreme. They take the form of colour planes surrounded by a thin black line. There is no relief, shade or depth. Sergio de Castro fully embraced the flatness of the sheet of paper and rejected the illusion of space. The objects are presented frontally to the viewer on a raised surface to facilitate their viewing.

The chair – one of the rare pieces of furniture in an artist’s studio – has frequently served as a pictorial subject for painters representing their daily lives through the objects around them, as evidenced by Vincent van Gogh, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Bernard Buffet, among others.

CONSTELLATIONS PAINTINGS

As Charles Sterling wrote, still life is “that fragment of the world that can be put in order twice, before painting it and while painting it”. This is because the arrangement decided by the artist in the observational phase does not correspond to the arrangement that is painted. Floating on a level plane, without any depth, the objects are arranged on the canvas or paper in a precarious balance between order and disorder. Nothing can be held in place indefinitely. Sergio de Castro’s Constellation works are reminiscent of the objects suspended in the air by Daniel Spoerri’s “snare-pictures”. Their impending descent introduces the notion of movement – the objects are not immobile but dancing. These are not static compositions as the term “still life” implies. Imbalance and disorder create a sense of rhythm, the objects like musical notes on a score. Indeed, Sergio de Castro was a musician before he became a painter and this part of his life profoundly influenced his pictorial work. While the still life genre is often a silent one, Sergio de Castro’s works are particularly musical. Arranged like notes in a composition, the pictorial elements of his works recall those of other music-lover painters such as Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

FISH PAINTINGS

Joaquín Torres-García in Montevideo, the country’s main port. The theme of fish naturally became very important in the work of these two friends. The fish is the only animal that can be observed in Sergio de Castro’s still lifes, in which we can mainly see manufactured objects and some fruits such as lemons and watermelons.

Fish are regularly represented in still life paintings of “table” scenes, as symbols of everyday meals. They are particularly present in Dutch paintings, which are oriented towards the theme of the sea, while French painters, such as Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, have also depicted them. The subject matter calls for quick work, as attested by the painter Eugène Boudin, who wrote: “The fish is delivered glistening on the painter’s board and, thanks to their speed, it is served on their table in the evening. They eat their models!” The fish is also an important spiritual symbol, particularly appreciated by the painter Paul Klee, among others.

TABLE-COLUMN PAINTINGS

In 1949, Sergio de Castro obtained a grant from the French government to study music. As such, he moved to Paris, where he settled for good. He gave up his activities as a composer, however, to devote himself to painting. The artist moved into a small studio and started painting still lifes by arranging objects on his table. The painter’s studio was so cramped that he did not have enough space to observe the entire table at once. Unfazed by the situation, he opened the door and moved into the corridor to observe his table through the doorway, which provided a long, narrow and partly hidden view. And so the artist’s Table-column paintings were born.

The table, which is completely turned up towards the viewer, and the objects stacked on top of each other in these vertical compositions create a sense of upward movement. The table becomes a ladder, a totem, a column. As if suspended in space, the objects in these works evoke the bodegón still-life paintings of the Spanish Golden Age.

WRITINGS ON SERGIO DE CASTRO ’S STILL-LIFES
André Chastel, Claude-Hélène SIBERT, Denys Sutton, Gertrud Koepke-Sutton, Dora Vallier

André Chastel, Un jeune peintre SERGIO DE CASTRO [A young painter SERGIO DE CASTRO], Le Monde, Courrier des arts, October 29, 1954

Abstract art and the other [art] overlap more than is claimed, but not many are able to grasp the sensitive point. A form of painting that forgets appearances and one that possesses them communicate over a small Chinese-style bridge, a bridge of dreams where the genius of painters like Castro is bound to remain. His exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, 2, Rue des Beaux- Arts, encapsulates a two-year experience with some fifteen compositions as original as they are discreet. Under the banner of columns, chairs and tables, minuscule signs reminiscent of the domino, the lemon or the colander are combined, but within a context in which they only have to be a disc or a rectangle to rival the watermelon or the sugar cube. Everything seems to float. Indeed, everything is arranged in depth-less bands in soft, delicate tones in orange and blue, and black with stripes, which, in the long run, could run the risk of being mawkish; but everything is held together in this way at the exact point at which a Klee-style sense of humour is able to accommodate the small methodical flags of a Kandinsky. To dot the i’s and cross the it’s, Castro has entitled one of these tables where a number of gravitating objects are projected in colour systems Constellations; their relationship becomes a space, and the imagination expands the day-to-day to the dimensions of the sky without losing a single contour.

Claude-Hélène SIBERT, Serge de Castro Galerie Pierre, Cimaise, Paris, november-december
1954

It is from the world around him, from the most common objects, that Serge de Castro draws the elements that make up his paintings. There are forks, spoons, everyday coffee pots and even earthenware pots containing a flower in bloom. Never, however, have objects been treated with so little interest in their significance. There is no vestige of realism in Castro’s work, far from it: one could blink and forget these objects, which are nevertheless painted with the strictest accuracy, with the meticulousness of an illuminator. For Castro, it seems that these objects are merely compositional pretexts. But why such pretexts, which are depersonalised in such a way that a slotted spoon becomes
a line ending in a circumference, a chair a stretch of vertical lines? The answer, or at least one of the many possible answers, is that, like many others, this young painter is looking for a way to avoid getting bogged down in the impasse of a form of abstraction that often pushes the boundaries towards academicism. A return to the realism of a Cadiou or another Buffet could never be in keeping with Castro’s subtle and discreet nature. Moreover, his concern for visual organisation far outweighs his concern for the expressive translation of the external world, and there is no question of this. What he is pursuing, therefore, is a real effort to interpenetrate the two worlds. The result, in the case of his particularly wellreceived paintings, is that these figurative elements, treated with rigour, with a dryness of intention in the contours, resound with poetic accents and delicate humour. Does this mean that Castro is on the path to a true discovery of style? I sincerely believe so. Even so, he is perhaps still too close to Kandinsky in his Parisian period who, outside of the realm of the figurative, had also achieved this subtle rhythmic harmony of juggling, contrapuntal forms on a light, solid background.

André CHASTEL, Un jeune peintre: Sergio de Castro [A young painter: Sergio de Castro], Le Monde, June 15, 1956

This young Argentine painter, who was a student of Torres Garcia in Buenos Aires, settled in Paris in 1949. A small exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre eighteen months ago presented a series of meticulous compositions with a deliberate sense of intimacy, metamorphosing objects to the limits of an abstract preciosity: he was treating still life painting as a Chinese garden. He is now exhibiting seventeen of his latest paintings at the Galerie Rive Gauche (44, Rue de Fleurus), where one can appreciate the coherence and breadth of his development: the Japanese flower has opened up. Three large compositions, dense and broadly constructed, show that the days of hesitation are over: the panel is laid out in tawny, orange or blue layers, which are brought to life precisely by a disc, the profile of a vase, and, in a sense, the furtive passage of an object. The solid, or discreetly modulated, planes of eggbased painting have given way to powerful brush strokes and passages compressed by the use of the knife. Like another talented young artist, Philippe Bonnet, who recently exhibited at the Berggruen Gallery, Castro has benefited superbly from the decisive inspiration drawn from the example of Nicola de Staël.
His style has thus become, in a sense, less unconventional, but faced with canvases such as L’Assiette bleue [The Blue Plate], Coin de table [Corner of the Table], in which orange and yellow are so well combined, and Nature morte [Still Life] with its exaggerated effect, it is clear that the artist’s delicacy and instinctive modesty, this penchant for the suave harmonies of the old Sienese style, have matured. A decision was necessary. It came about by heightening both the analogical nature of the compositions with certain “abstract” dispositions (such as those of Poliakoff) and a commendable independence with regards to the form: three or four canvases, which are mementoes of Greece, combine a convincing, concrete density (villages on the sea…) with the maximum degree of organisation of a freely worked medium.
There is, in this profound resourcefulness, and in the tension that builds up and keeps itself in check, something like the noble aim of Saint-John Perse to use “Rite and measure against the impatience of the poem”.

Denys Sutton, Apollo, n°394, London, 1957, extract

During 1953 and 1954, Castro spent much of his time working in egg tempera, a difficult and complicated process that demands patience and skill to secure rewards. Such paintings do not permit of alteration in the course of execution; hence their preparation imposes a stringent selfdiscipline. His experience in this medium may well have trengthened his belief that painting ought to possess a formal significance.His most personal contribution in this period lay in a series of compositions which he termed “Constellations”; arrangements of objects that derive their logic from their position in the picture space, the solutions advanced relying upon an exact degree of placing and upon a fineness in the colour. These experiments taught him the relevance of colour if forms are to assume life and validity. Castro has learnt much from the “poetical” painters of our century, from Paul Klee in particular; also, one suspects, he has been influenced by Kandinsky; 1t would be logical to suppose that he would have been attracted towards an artist who had distinct ideas on the relationship between music and painting, which were vented “the Blaue Reiter”. This phase of his development, in which forms and images interweave closed with the series of delicate still-life composition like the Hommage à Chardin which possess an exquisite sense of equilibrium.

When Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) returned to South America from Paris in the late 1930s, he became the natural leader of the young painting movement and, in 1941, Castro became his student. Torres García’s work was based on a simplified, constructivist colour scheme, and composition that incorporated Cubist elements. He taught his students to work with only five colours within a structure of dominant lines. The surface of the painting had to be completely covered by colour, while the pattern had to unfold in two dimensions on the canvas, requirements that for a long time typified and, in part, restrained Castro. And yet, he unreservedly acknowledges Torres García as his master, the one who taught him the craft. After moving to Paris, he practised painting and composition for a few years but gave up music in 1953 to devote himself entirely to painting.

Castro did not join a new school or a new movement in the wake of Torres García’s death. A painter collects everything that gives him a visual stimulus – but there are times when it is the ineffable impressions that leave the deepest mark. Of the experiences he gained during his first few years in Paris, Castro recalls with particular pleasure a landscape by Cézanne, which the painter Vieira da Silva had borrowed from an art dealer and which Castro looked at frequently. He and Vieira da Silva live on opposite sides of the Parc Montsouris, in the same neighbourhood where Braque and Nicolas de Staël once lived. Castro never met de Staël, but they had mutual friends, and the great Russian cast a shadow that could not be easily ignored. Despite technical and psychological differences, his rendering of landscapes and still lifes in blocks of colour must have had an impact on Castro’s painted work in the mid-1950s, and Castro himself makes no secret of his admiration for de Staël. Less tangible is the craze for the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. Both developed an eye for making records with a premonitory finesse and a sensibility for nuance so precise and subtle that the same subject could serve as the starting point for countless very different paintings. Castro lacks the metaphysical undertones that make Morandi’s still lifes so enigmatic; on the other hand, he freely manipulates his subjects independently of the model and without using, as Morandi did, linear perspective and modelling with light and shadow. They approach the subject from different angles, but can sometimes achieve almost identical results. In 1968, Castro kept a still life by Morandi in his studio for a long time.

In addition, Castro has worked continuously to cultivate the old masters. He reproduced works by Velázquez (1961) and reinterpreted works by El Greco. During a trip to Italy in 1950, he fell in love with Sienese painting. The soft rhythms, the gentle sonorities of the frescoes and the presence of the wall beneath the colours brought out abilities in the artist that Torres García’s hand painting had not been able to unleash.

Moreover, repulsed by the Parisian cult of the medium, of “the ‘physical’ medium of oil”, he abandoned oil paint with its distinctive consistency and worked exclusively in tempera for four years (1951-55), using egg white as a binding agent, a technique that required a great deal of patience and discipline. It was immediately after this period that I met Castro for the first time. I can recall his studio full of eggs, large canvases with well-defined objects arranged across the surface without perspective, side by side or one above the other, like columns; he called them “columns” and “constellations”. Despite being almost half a century old, Castro has not lost his ability to experience miracles. For him, there are still moments when everything is perfect, when existence has a meaning and every little detail has a pictorial, emotional and intellectual context. Enamoured with life, he is both romantic and down-to-earth, and has the same uncompromisingly direct relationship with people as he does with colours. Many people have seen the paintings in the studio on Rue du Saint-Gothard. I first went there to fret over the burgeoning dusk, which no electric light was permitted to disperse, and then to surrender to something that is now so rare, that is “to grow ever darker”. For Castro, this is the most inspiring time of the day. The fading daylight becomes an inexhaustible source of knowledge about the nature and possibilities of colour. Facing the wall is the “variety of images” that no one is allowed to alter: grey squares in luminous frames, from the smallest dimensions to more than two meters high, a symphony in grey, realised by Mondrian, in which the harmonies change with the passage from light to darkness. The whole studio becomes a magical space of colours, which move across the canvases so that things are themselves and more than themselves. Castro dances among them, preferably on his bare toes – observing one thing, then another, up close and from afar, captivated a hundred times by the outline of Francine del Pierre’s ceramic pieces thrown from the windowsill onto the wall – and ends up playing a Bach concerto on the gramophone when the light has gone dark, but not before. Everything is in its own time, and all with care, patience and intensity, driven by the same absolute dedication to quality that distinguishes everything that issues from Castro’s hand.

Dora Vallier, L’oeil écoute [The eye listens], Catalog of the exhibition Sergio de Castro, Natures–Mortes 1958-1965, Galerie des Ambassades, Paris, 1988

By definition, painting is a call for the attention of our eyes. It can be loud, violent, aggressive, ironic or, conversely, whispered, indolent or even inaudible. Between the two extremes, the words that can be used to describe the way in which a painting addresses us are infinite. In the case of the still lifes by Sergio de Castro, one may say without hesitation that they make the gentlest appeal to us with a precision of tone that is maintained without fail throughout the multiple variations that each of his paintings presents around us. So much so that one is tempted to insist on the double meaning, both musical and pictorial, of the word tone. Faced with Castro’s still lifes, “the eye listens”. The silence in question emerges from the forms while the colours animate and amplify it through a wide chromatic range in which all the nuances extend into each other to achieve a joint unfolding. It is clearly this aspect of Castro’s paintings that so readily captures our gaze: it is a call for the attention of our eyes. It is an unusual appeal that asserts itself in a silent manner, and for this very reason, it holds us back. But what does it have to say? What do these still lifes tell us about? The answer, it seems to me, in order to be clear, would be oblique insofar as one would first have to question the still life it self.

Still life as a genre
“Artists have known for centuries that a vase may be worth an angel. But critical thought and general awareness have only recently acquired this notion, in about 1875, when the cult of nature in its two forms, realist and impressionist, finally restored the old masters of still life painting to their place of honour.” These few lines from Charles Sterling, the art historian whose name is linked to the study of still life painting, summarise the fate, inconceivable for us
today, of this genre of painting, which has been the subject of so many prejudices. After first appearing in ancient times, in Pompeii and Herculaneum, still life painting was revived over the centuries – but only as the fragment of a scene with a “noble subject” – and then accepted as an independent genre from the seventeenth century onwards, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the genre was granted its own acclaim from Cézanne onwards it became a common subject in twentieth-century painting. This can be explained by the fact that still life painting has an inner strength that came to prevail, or rather, came to be recognised, at a time when painting itself was becoming increasingly focused on the act of painting. While other genres (take mythological, religious or historical scenes) have
declined after many incarnations, still life painting has remained exactly as it was two thousand years ago: close, in its immobility to the portrait and yet very different in the way it has been perceived, in the sense that the portrait, which is the image of man, has always been respected, in contrast to the still life, which has been marginalised for its representation of the inanimate banality of everyday life.

And yet, that banality has demonstrated its imperishable strength. Since Pompeii, flowers and fruit, a goblet or a vase have been there to offer us an image of things that are within reach, in our little universe, this shell that is necessary to our existence (psychoanalysis would have a lot to say about this!) in which a known silence resists the “silence of infinite spaces” that frightened Pascal.

Castro’s still lifes
The particular force of the still life genre suits Castro since he is its most obvious heir in a manner of faithfulness that
deserves attention. The still lifes exhibited here were painted between 1958 and 1965, i.e. at a time when abstract painting, which had already been accepted, allowed the figurative painter to approach a subject, not in order to describe it but to extract the essential, or, in a sense, the operating principle: that which, beyond the objects depicted, is able to communicate their presence. Making such a presence perceptible was the challenge of these post-abstract still lifes, which are works of painting and painting alone, through a very careful process of elaboration intended to penetrate the simplicity of everyday life, to filter it in order to decant its strength. To this end, a variety of techniques were used, some more skilful than others. From superimposed chromatic layers, sometimes applied with a knife, sometimes with lighter, sometimes stronger gestures, sometimes modulated with the brush using fragmented strokes, the firmness and suppleness of the tool kept in constant balance, a whole body of work in the background ensuring
that these still life paintings have a new foundation each time. While, at the same time, Castro restricts the chromatic range, he does so in order to subject it to the most subtle treatment, one in which all contrasts are avoided in order to allow neighbouring tones to play off each other, the minute differences between which take on an unexpected magnitude, a kind of diffuse light, radiated by the colours themselves, indefinable in itself. Not a single agreed name for the colours can, in fact, capture Castro’s palette.

To give them a name, one is compelled to resort to reduplication – ochre-yellow, ochre-green, ochre-red-pink – or one
must specify a separation into strands by juxtaposition – dark grey, light grey, and so on. This demonstrates that the field of action of this work touches on a suspended expanse that should not be disturbed by anything. The strong accent, when there is one in the painting, is at most a lighter colour, never a darker one. Isn’t the power of still life painting, par excellence, implosive and contained? Castro has made this his rule of conduct. And so he conceives the forms he paints, in the background. He does not assign them any clear-cut limits. An outline in reserve seems, on the contrary, to cause them to expand, all the more so since their configurations, which are as close to each other as the colours, are – just like them – beyond any agreed appellation, since they are allusions to geometric forms that share a frontality of plane as their common denominator. While they are distinguished from each other – like the colours –, this is so as to better constitute an expanding whole. Everything contributes to making the painting concur with the emblem of still life: the reassuring mental image of our closest world, a sure antidote to anguish.

SERGIO DE CASTRO’S EARLY LIFE AND ARTISTIC TRAINING
Born on 15 September 1922 in Buenos Aires, Sergio de Castro spent his childhood between
Lausanne, Switzerland, and Turin, Italy. The young Sergio learned Spanish in Uruguay and began
writing his first poems. In 1939, at the age of 17, Sergio de Castro walked along the Uruguayan coast
by himself, travelling from Montevideo to Brazil. It was then that he met Joaquin Torres-Garcia
(1874-1949), an artist whose teaching would play a decisive role in the Argentine’s development.
At his father’s request, Sergio de Castro spent a year studying architecture; meanwhile, he was
already active as a composer and also began to explore drawing and painting.

SERGIO DE CASTRO AND MUSIC
A multi-talented and precocious artist, Sergio de Castro also expressed himself through music, which he studied from 1933 to 1938. He wrote musical works that were performed in concert for the first time in 1940 at the University of Montevideo. It was then that he was spotted by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and the composer Alberto Ginastera.

In 1945, Sergio de Castro moved to Córdoba in Argentina, where he worked as the assistant of the composer Manuel de Falla for 18 months, until the latter’s death. In 1947, the actress Cecilia Ingenieros—a student of the dancer Martha Graham—staged a ballet at the Teatro del Pueblo in Buenos Aires based on Sergio de Castro’s musical work Doce variationes breves. Two years later, he was appointed as a professor of music history at the new conservatory in La Plata, Argentina. With the help of a grant from the French government, Sergio de Castro moved to Paris in 1949 to complete his musical training. The following year, he joined the music group Zodiaque, which was headed by the composer Maurice Ohana.

Although Sergio de Castro eventually put music aside to devote himself to painting, he was still regularly invited to musical events. The Maillon cultural center (in Strasbourg), for example, exhibited a series of works during a musical week dedicated to Maurice Ohana and the music of the Hesperides in 1986. In the same year, Sergio de Castro was invited to the Festival des Musiques Actuelles Nice Côte d’Azur (the ‘MANCA’ Festival). In 1992, Silvina Luz Mansilla published the first volume of her Diccionario De La Musica Espanola E Hispanoamericana in Spain, which included a text on the musical work of Sergio de Castro.

THE ARTIST SERGIO DE CASTRO IN ARGENTINA
Sergio de Castro settled in Buenos Aires in 1942 and had his first exhibition at the Ateneo de Montevideo. His work was also exhibited at the Torres Garcia studio—an organisation founded in 1943 by the artist Joaquín Torres-García to enable young artists to access training. The following year, Sergio de Castro, Joaquín Torres-García and his students worked together on a series of murals for the Martirené Pavilion of the Saint Bois Hospital in Montevideo. Sergio de Castro took part in the group exhibition Pintura uruguaya, which was held at Comte Gallery in Buenos Aires, in the same year. In 1946, he travelled to the northwest of Argentina and the south of Peru to study pre-Columbian art, accompanied by the painters Gonzalo Fonseca, Julio Alpuy and Jonio Montiel.

Sergio de Castro moved back to Buenos Aires in 1947. The following year, he was presented at the Salon of the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts. His works were also presented at the Viao Gallery, the Bonino Gallery and the Van Riel Gallery. In 1987, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires organised a retrospective dedicated to the artist’s work, which presented some one hundred works.

THE ARTIST SERGIO DE CASTRO IN FRANCE
Sergio de Castro was awarded a grant by the French government in 1949 and settled permanently in Paris in November of the same year. In 1950, the artist was hospitalised due to severe asthma attacks at the Necker Hospital in Paris, where he spent much time drawing. The following year, he painted a monumental work in oil on canvas measuring 160 x 300 cm, which he called El Puerto. From then on, he retired from his activities as a composer to devote himself to painting and stained glass work. In 1952, Sergio de Castro had his first solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie Jeanne Castel, where he presented a collection of still lifes. Starting to paint with egg tempera, he went on to exhibit his works at the Galerie Pierre. He was also represented in the French capital by the Galerie Max Kaganovich, the Galerie Rive-Gauche and the Galerie Charpentier. Sergio de Castro met many artists—such as Picasso, whom he met in Paris and in the South of France where he went in summer—and exhibited alongside Bazaine, Picasso, Lanskoy and de Staël. In 1953, Sergio de Castro set up his studio at 16 bis Rue du Saint-Gothard in Paris’ 14th arrondissement, where he began work on his large linear compositions.

The artist became a naturalised French citizen in 1979 and was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1999. In 2003, he made preparations for a donation of works to the Museum of Saint-Lô (Normandy) with the curator Michel Carduner. In 2006, the entire donation (comprising 220 works) was presented to the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Histoire in Saint-Lô.

STAINED GLASS IN SERGIO DE CASTRO’S WORK
Sergio de Castro was a multi-faceted artist. In addition to paintings and music, he also created a number of stained glass works. In 1956, Sergio de Castro began work on a monumental stainedglass work entitled La Création du Monde [The Creation of the World]. Measuring 6 x 20 metres, the work was designed for the church of the Benedictine Monastery of Saint-Sacrement in Couvrechef-la-Folie, near Caen—a building rebuilt after the war. In 1968, he created a 4.5 x 17 metre stained glass window for the 1st Lutheran Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche in Hamburg. In 1979, Sergio de Castro began work on the composition of five stained glass windows for the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Romont, Fribourg (Switzerland), which were installed two years later. In 1980, he was invited to the 1st Salon of Stained Glass at the International Stained-Glass Centre in Chartres, France, where he presented Résurrection, a stained glass work measuring 4.2 x 1.2 metres.

The 1st Festival of Contemporary Sacred Art presented an exhibition dedicated to Sergio de Castro
with 72 works from 1948-1978 on religious subjects at the Musée Diocésain d’Art Religieux in
1988. In the book Les Trésors de la France, published in 1988, the author Michel Parent wrote two
texts in the section on “Contemporary Stained Glass”, entitled Audincourt et Fernand Léger and
La Folie-Couvrechef et Sergio de Castro. In 2008, the Saint-Lô Museum presented the exhibition 50 ans d’Art du Vitrail autour de Sergio de Castro and then inaugurated the stained glass windows Abécédaire and Chiffres in 2012.

INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION FOR THE ARTIST SERGIO DE CASTRO
Several retrospectives have been devoted to the artist in many countries. Sergio de Castro went to the United Kingdom for the first time in 1957 and had his first solo exhibition in London at the Matthiesen Gallery the following year. In 1962, the editor of Apollo magazine, Denys Sutton, organised an exhibition of his work at the Leicester Gallery before publishing a monograph on Sergio de Castro in 1964. A solo exhibition of the artist’s work entitled Homages and Variations was presented at the French Institute in London in 1987, exhibiting 30 works from 1957-1975 inspired by Dürer, Holbein, El Greco and Vermeer.

Sergio de Castro also had strong ties to Switzerland, his childhood home. His work was presented in 1958 in Lucerne at the Kunst-Museum in a group exhibition entitled Junge Maler aus Deutschland und Frankreich. In 1966, the artist was presented in a major retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Fribourg, where 103 of the artist’s works were shown. A solo exhibition of Sergio de Castro’s work was organised at the Castle of Gruyères in 2008.

Sergio de Castro’s work also became well known in Germany, where it was featured at the Documenta II exhibition in Kassel in 1959. Hans Platte organised the first retrospective of Sergio de Castro’s work in an exhibition comprising 110 works at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1965. The following year, the exhibition Variationnen über ein Thema organised by Thomas Grochowiak at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen presented eight variations on Le Greco by Sergio de Castro. The exhibition would include works by Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, among others.

In Italy, Sergio de Castro participated in the Biennale Francia-Italia at the Palazzo delle Arte al Valentino in Turin in 1956. The gallery owner Bruno Lorenzelli then presented 40 works by the artist in Milan in 1963 and in Bergamo in 1964. In 1980, Sergio de Castro participated in the 39th Venice Biennale, where he presented large-format works from the 1970s in the Argentine Pavilion.

Sergio de Castro was also exhibited in the United States. In 1960, the artist won the fourth prize in the Fifth International Hallmark Art Award alongside the painters Alechinsky, Marsicano and Charchoune. In 1995, he participated in a group exhibition at the Chac-Mool Gallery in Los Angeles.

Sergio de Castro died in Paris on 31 December 2012. He was laid to rest in the Montparnasse cemetery.