Untitled

“Sometimes called the synthetic period, all of Iberê’s final work tends to erase some of the polarising differences. Even when the figure is a latency without complete bodily physiognomy, what we have are stages of form, vibrations, where the linear and the painterly merge together. I share Cecília Cotrim’s conclusion when she points out ‘the difficulty of defining boundaries between an object and the bundle of things formed by the world, the essences, life, the soil’ in these new figures. In this process of artistic convergence, the place recovered by drawing as the almost primary principle of creation, the possibility of giving the image real virtuality, may also be the primary painterly gesture, but the final one as well. In the case of this late Iberê, he ends up drawing on the canvases after applying the various layers of painting. This drawing-painting articulation will also appear in the artist’s great output of mixed drawings and gouaches, where the line and outlines of any circumscription question the characteristics of structure and surface, sketch and final result. [...]
It is also clear in the drawing of these examples that ‘drawing is an open fact’ (as Mario de Andrade said), in the sense that it has great freedom, a capacity for rapid, translative action, perhaps because it is close to writing, the most confessional route that exists for a visual artist. Indeed, the strengthened ‘restoration’ of drawing as a contemporary genre, particularly since the 80s, now as its own field or as hybrid, places this part of Iberê’s output in closer harmony with our own times.”
Adolfo Montejo Navas, Conjuro do mundo: as figuras-cesuras de Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2012), 113-114.