Painter and Mannequin

“[...] The painter and his model is an issue that has been well examined over the course of the history of art. The source of eroticism, in the case of Pablo Picasso’s paintings and engravings, the artist is the voyeur immortalized in the act of gazing. Iberê worked with both live models and mannequins. One example is Pintor e manequim (Painter and Mannequin) (1987), from the same year as the series Fantasmagorias (Phantasmagorias), in which his muse is a spectral automaton – the Olympia created by the evil Copellius? – endowed with the genitals which the anonymous manufacturer had deprived her of. The figures are on the same plane, and Iberê represents himself painting, or modeling the mannequin, working on its body, giving it life, like Pygmalion. In this ‘parody of God’, the maker-painter-man, paradoxically brings forth death, corrupted flesh, the phantasmagoria of his inner self. Deception as an existential experience is an overriding theme in Iberê’s work since the 1980s, for he said that his intention when painting was to ‘shape a truth’, hence these grotesque forms: ‘(...) there is no one ideal of beauty, but rather an ideal of a piercing and painful truth, which is my life, and yours, it is our life as we make our way through the world’.”
María José Herrera, Iberê Camargo: um ensaio visual (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2009), 100.