Woman and Chair

“Many of these gouache drawings are idiots in various groupings, figures that do not converse or relate to each other: they just are, and are isolated. Another group of images is a ‘dialogue’ – deaf, and opaque – with an empty chair, completely drained, without body, and pierced by the same governing emptiness. That realm of the void, certainly with a desolate atmosphere, is contrasted with the lively, brighter colour, however, which therefore allows other senses of light (a certain chromatic fiesta such as Delacroix demanded). Some examples contain figures that manage to be enveloped in a kind of cloud-aura, a mass of colour, or different atmospheres. And once again colour takes over the works, imposing itself over the entire surface of the paper, covering the whole scene, not just what is depicted or what appears. Everything is represented in a climate in which the colours and lines of things are the modulation, the vocabulary. Everything is so dry and schematic – synthetic image-figures – yet at the same time full of a degree of exuberance (fields of colour running across and interpenetrating the lines of the figures). Something that is perhaps clearer here, in these mixed-media drawings, but which is part of the painter’s intense career, his physical submission to colour, to the forms that unite it.”
Adolfo Montejo Navas, Conjuro do mundo: as figuras-cesuras de Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2012), 118-119.