Cyclists Series

“The painting from the series Ciclistas (Cyclists) (1990) is both the thematic and formal synthesis of this group. As subject matter, the landscape no longer contains signs of identification and has become background, which is at the same time form. The undefined background relates to a metaphysical uncertainty, the impossibility of defining the place of the human being. Where is he? Inside himself, with no reference to the external and emphasising the internal. Like most of the works from the artist’s late period, this picture juxtaposes different elements that he had worked with individually throughout his career. Here we have the human figure, a cyclist, from the series of the same name, and the landscape, the subject of his initial pictorial investigations and the foundation of his creative practice.
This is no chance association: it brings together two of the artist’s favourite themes, figure and landscape, in search of a more accurate expression of his anxieties. Formally, the facture treats the background quite thinly, despite the visual overlapping of countless layers to give it some density, as Blanca Brites has written: ‘Anyone who watched him painting noticed that each painting had an accumulation of a succession of other, ‘unfinished’ works, which continually dissolved under the new brushwork, with apparently nothing remaining of those stages in the completed work.’
Depth is more indicated than shown, producing a flat space with the figure of the cyclist apparently on the surface of the picture. This figure is given a different treatment from the background, with denser and thicker handling, through the application of almost pure paint and the emphasis of the graphic marks that define it, with their roots in his drawings and prints, but also in the Fantasmagorias (Phantasmagorias) series. But this materiality is misleading, for while the figure is clear and practically visible in its entirety, the bicycle, the vehicle carrying the figure, merges into the landscape, like an apparition, an imprecise, ghostly form produced by the artist’s extensive use of glazing. What is the meaning behind this duality between clarity and imprecision? Neither element, cyclist nor landscape, has a defined place; everything merges into the totality of painting.”
Paulo Gomes, Iberê e seu ateliê: as coisas, as pessoas e os lugares (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2015), 158-159.