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“Chronology serves as a guide for entry into the work of Iberê Camargo. A relation to the past, as it were to a happy lost world, is what lends a melancholy tone to one of the most significant and solitary quests in Brazilian painting of the past half-century. The land of childhood, that region surrounding Restina Seca where Camargo was born in 1914, was undoubtedly a hard one; in several commentaries the painter describes its deserted and abandoned aspects. Yet in his personal memoirs it retains a warmth emanating from familial spaces: the home, and the railway station where his father worked. Emphasising the importance of sky and horizon, lines traced by the train tracks, disappearing into the distance, feature in Camargo’s solitude-infused landscapes, as do telegraph wires in the sky – wires belonging to the telegraph company for which his mother worked.
An isolated world, then, turned in upon itself, but at the same time linked to other worlds through those lines running away into the distance that Camargo’s drawings tirelessly reproduce. [...]”
Jacques Leenhardt, Iberê Camargo: os meandros da memória (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2010), 104.