Signo branco I (White Sign I)

“For a considerable time these paintings were formed of dense masses of paint, which could be compared with the materiality of real objects.
For almost three decades (from the 1960s to the early 1980s) accumulated layers of painting became a characteristic feature of Iberê’s work, generating a material painting, paint as body. The colours are overlaid, mixed together on the surface of the canvas itself, leaving traces of each one but generating another colour. The scrapes of the spatula created veladuras opacas [opaque glazes] during this period: fleshy, unlike the traditional concept of glazing (veils of transparent, strongly diluted, thin colour). If traditional glazes are achieved through addition, opaque ones come about through removal, leaving traces, like scratches on the skin. Lines made with the handle of the brush, running through the layers of paint and forming images, provoke effects similar to injuries, drawings on the colour in negative. Marks of the brush-hairs on the painting surface, recreated the painter’s gestures with his weapons, as he called them. A demonstration of this flesh-matter can be seen in the painting Signo branco I (White Sign I).”
Icleia Borsa Cattani, Paisagens de dentro: as últimas pinturas de Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2009), 51.

"As we know, in the artist's early canvases the picture plane is shown strictly frontally, with the mesh of spools arranged in parallel to the spectator, as if welded to the surface of the picture. At the start of the 1960s this plane starts to tilt, loosening its structural ties, and the spools that were previously imbedded in a surface that perfectly coincided with the picture plane lost their stability, to be driven into the dark, muddy depths. At the end od the decade and throughout the 1970s the clallenge to the plane becomes more extreme: any remaining references to the coordinates of vision are dissolved and any allusion to gravity and the upright position of the spectator disappears."
Sônia Salzstein, "Ausência dos Carretéis," in Mônica Zielinsky, Paulo Sergio Duarte and Sônia Salztein, Moderno no limite (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2008), 125.