Iberê Camargo and the sketches for the World Health Organization panel

“[...] Mario Carneiro, at seeing the panel made by Iberê for the World Health Organization in Geneva (1966), the culmination of his nearness to the informal, confesses to having thought, ‘Iberê is losing the structure of the work…’. In fact, there are preparatory drawings that testify to a careful preparation of that panel, in the direction of the gestures as well as in the distribution of colors. But it was necessary that the entire construction would come apart in the execution, letting emerge unplanned impulses. Structure, to Iberê, is civilization, culture. Matter opposes it, as primordial nature, and the gesture, which is also nature, is also in opposition, in what it possesses of unreasoning impulse.
Certainly the panel of Geneva marks an extreme point of dissolution of form. Soon after, motifs emerge again (reels, dice), no more, however, as objects that have volume or contour, but almost, so to speak, as crimps, wrinkles of the pictorial matter itself. [...]”
Lorenzo Mammí, Iberê Camargo: as horas [o tempo como motivo] (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2014), 85.

[...] On the basis of the design he had brought with him, he began to play freely with forms and the final result, after seven months’ work, conserves the general lines of the project he had carried out in Brazil. In an interview with Clarice Lispector, Camargo explained that expansion, in the sense in which he used the concept, meant liberation. This seems to have been the allegory of the Geneva panel. Liberated forms, or rather, ones trapped beneath the tangle of gestures that lead to their dissolution: birds, carts, dice, spirals. A huge floral bouquet, as Carneiro suggested, a ‘joyful’ work which evokes the sense of balance implicit in the notion of good health."
María José Herrera, Iberê Camargo: um ensaio visual (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2009), 102.