From a concrete base rises an abstract sculpture formed of an elongated, pierced cylindrical stone mass. Situated near the other artworks produced for the event in Mount Royal Park, Agustín Cárdenas’s monumental sculpture is covered with a patterned finish that recalls the artist’s performance on the material, produced before an audience.

The pointed top refers to the ramparts of a roofline and takes the form of a fragment of a eccentric temple, the rounded columns of which converge into a single piece. However, it is the biomorphic dimension of the work that dominates. In the view of Guy Viau, one of the Symposium organizers, the curves “suggest that the human body has been buried by osmosis in the stone and animates it by magic.” 1

This interpretation underlines the vaguely phantasmagorical impression that the artwork gives. Like the wooden “totems” that he produced throughout his career, the sinuous, mysteriously evocative lines of this sculpture recall Cárdenas’s surrealist roots in the 1950s, when he worked with André Breton.

1. Guy Viau, “Un symposium sur le Mont-Royal,” Vie des arts, no. 37 (1965): 28–31 (our translation).

Cárdenas’s artwork was executed for the International Sculpture Symposium in Montréal (1964), the first time a symposium was held in North America. The goals of this concept, created a few years earlier in Europe, were to have artists create monumental sculptures in a context of encounters with the public and to provide public spaces with international-calibre artworks. Instigated by sculptor Robert Roussil, this symposium gathered 11 sculptors from nine countries and attracted more than 40,000 visitors. It was seen as one of the events that brought Québec into artistic and cultural modernity.