Spools with Figure

“[...] In the following years [1980’s], Iberê also tests other solutions: sometimes the face is not next to, but in the middle of the other figures, or as much in the lateral as in the center. When it is in the center, is usually in frontal position and looking at the outside of the frame. The separation in this case is no longer between two areas of the screen, one stalking the other: everything that is on the screen offers itself to the look of the outsider. The face is more explicitly one thing among others.
This feeling is even more pronounced when the face is framed in a rectangle, as if it were not a person but a portrait. In one case (Carretéis com figura (Spools with Figure)), 1984, it is a white mask in profile with deep black eye-sockets in the center of the composition. Sometimes instead of the face or the half figure, or with them, there is one open hand or two, mere signs of human presence, such as those found in prehistoric paintings. But when those hands are close to the face or torso, forcibly are related to it, outlining a gesture: as if the figure had raised his hand to answer an appeal, or had extended it to show something, or to put it on the face as a defensive gesture.
In short, the presence of fragments of human figure fundamentally alters the relationship matter/gesture that characterized the painting of Iberê of previous decades. In the past, it used to happen entirely in the act of painting. Now, it finds its double in the relationship, within the painting, between characters and objects. [...]”
Lorenzo Mammí, Iberê Camargo: as horas [o tempo como motivo] (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2014), 86.

“Averse to conventions, resenting all sorts of imposed, arbitrary constraints, Camargo stretches out the limits of the canvas and seems to re-enact upon it the lived experiences through a struggle with the thickness and resistance of his materials. The existential drama is thus reenacted in a gestural performance with the flat surface as its arena. More than modeling, he revolves and macerates, tensioning to its limits the pictorial matter in such a way as to extract a meaning as a coagulation of form. Truth in painting, therefore, is co-extensive to those semantic condensations within a grammar of recurring signs (tables, spools, cubes, dice, bicycles, sketches of human shapes, faces and torsos, landscapes, and so forth). ‘When you paint’, says Camargo, ‘the image is immobilized, it becomes fixed, and perception is made objective’; It is through pictorial work (a concrete action upon the world) that form emerges from the empirical states and the flow of conscience to rise to the world. As an undeniable vector for the constitution of this expressionistic poetic that it is essentially materialistic and concrete, he emphasizes the granulation and the phenomenality of experience that, just like his paintings, settles in levels of matter and meaning.”
Virginia H. A. Aita, Iberê Camargo: uma experiência da pintura (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2009), 118.