The fascination of the sculptures titled Gardens by Consagra is even greater if they are conceptually linked to his Suspended Planes and Transparent Irons, which he began in 1964: taken together, they come to constitute a kind of artificial landscape, embodying a sculptural emotion of living, a fantasy realized. All these works, painted pink, blue, lilac or turquoise, were made in a key period of the artist’s career, when he seemed able to reinvent sculpture in a new empathetic relationship with society. Consagra, who had by then explored every aspect of heavy metals, chose at this stage to use color as the essential body of the sculpture, thus relieving the work of all ideological tension. In his White Garden, produced in two unique pieces, a sudden updraft seems to propel the fragments of the sheets, thinning them, curving them and composing them into a single image. In an alternation of gravity and levitation, the sheets undulate and converge, evoking a cocoon opening up. Using automobile paint, this White Garden, along with the Orange, Car­mine, Purple and Black Gardens, suggests that sculpture can also convey the freedom of appearing sensitively fragile and mutable.