Untitled

"For the observer, drawing at this level perhaps has some advantage over painting. Drawing, thank to its line, almost always leaves the route of its construction visible. As a spectator looking at a line, I can reconstruct the artist’s gesture in making it. Line closes a narrative (however little the narrative intended by the drawing): line has a beginning, a development and an epilogue. In painting, and even more so in oil painting, with layers plastered over layers as they are in Iberê, that route is difficult to make out. Following the line with the eye, I redraw the artist’s hand and eye in constructing the landscape, the tree trunk, the transparent waters of Venice or the outline of a body. In drawing the human figure, Iberê seems to relish the course and overlapping of the line itself, the hand dances across the paper, concentrates on the face, slides over the body, defines the precise shape of a figure. Drawings like this remind us that line is the record of a movement in time – just as it is the record of an action in space."
Eduardo Veras, A linha incontornável: desenhos de Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2011), 116.