According to the Spanish art critic Manuel Pérez Lizano, who lives in Puerto Rico, there are two movements in contemporary Puerto Rican sculpture: a Neo-Constructivist trend and an Informalist trend. He says that Manuel de J. Feliciano, Melquiades Rosario Sastre, and Celia N. Rodríguez are among the best known Informalist artists. Pérez Lizano claims that figurative sculpture is in a state of crisis due to the “lack of an ongoing tradition and, no doubt, to the prevalence of a rampant, conservative academicism.”

Melquiades Rosario Sastre (Morovis, b. 1953) is currently the best known of these three sculptors. In 1982 he founded and directed the Asociación de Escultores de Puerto Rico [Puerto Rican Sculptors Association]. He was a professor at the Escuela de Arte de San Juan until 1986. In 1993 he was awarded first prize at the Segundo Certamen Nacional del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico [2nd National Competition of the Puerto Rican Contemporary Art Museum]. Plástica magazine, where this review was published, was an art publication that appeared fairly regularly in Puerto Rico. It began modestly enough in 1968, as the newsletter of the Liga de arte de San Juan [San Juan Art League], but changed its name in 1978 to Plástica revista de la Liga de estudiantes de San Juan [San Juan Student League Visual Arts Magazine]. Its very specific title notwithstanding, the twenty-one issues of the magazine explored a wide range of subjects within the broad parameters of Puerto Rican and Latin American art, filling its pages with retrospective coverage of subjects, such as the V Bienal de San Juan del grabado latinoamericano y del Caribe [5th San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Prints] (1981), Puerto Rican architecre, and Latin American visual arts. The first editorial board of the magazine included Hélène Saldaña, Delta Picó, Cordelia Buitrago, and J.M. García Segovia. In addition to the many essays written by top Puerto Rican thinkers, the magazine published contributions from some of the leading Latin American artists and critics, such as Luis Camnitzer, Damián Bayón, Jacqueline Barnitz, Samuel Cherson, Joseph Alsop, Omar Rayo, and Ricardo Pau Llosa, among many others. The previous year, Manuel Pérez Lizano published an essay titled: “Escultura actual en Puerto Rico” [Contemporary Sculpture in Puerto Rico] (see 805159).