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World Health Organization panel, Geneva

Iberê Camargo1966

Iberê Camargo Foundation

Iberê Camargo Foundation
Porto Alegre, Brazil

“[...] Mario Carneiro, at seeing the panel made by Iberê for the World Health Organization in Geneva (1966), the culmination of his nearness to the informal, confesses to having thought, ‘Iberê is losing the structure of the work…’. In fact, there are preparatory drawings that testify to a careful preparation of that panel, in the direction of the gestures as well as in the distribution of colors. But it was necessary that the entire construction would come apart in the execution, letting emerge unplanned impulses. Structure, to Iberê, is civilization, culture. Matter opposes it, as primordial nature, and the gesture, which is also nature, is also in opposition, in what it possesses of unreasoning impulse.
Certainly the panel of Geneva marks an extreme point of dissolution of form. Soon after, motifs emerge again (reels, dice), no more, however, as objects that have volume or contour, but almost, so to speak, as crimps, wrinkles of the pictorial matter itself. [...]”
Lorenzo Mammí, Iberê Camargo: as horas [o tempo como motivo] (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2014), 85.

[...] On the basis of the design he had brought with him, he began to play freely with forms and the final result, after seven months’ work, conserves the general lines of the project he had carried out in Brazil. In an interview with Clarice Lispector, Camargo explained that expansion, in the sense in which he used the concept, meant liberation. This seems to have been the allegory of the Geneva panel. Liberated forms, or rather, ones trapped beneath the tangle of gestures that lead to their dissolution: birds, carts, dice, spirals. A huge floral bouquet, as Carneiro suggested, a ‘joyful’ work which evokes the sense of balance implicit in the notion of good health."
María José Herrera, Iberê Camargo: um ensaio visual (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2009), 102.

"Ninguém discordaria que as obras de grandes dimensões produzidas pelo artista a partir de 1960 eram um acontecimento inaugural na história da pintura brasileira, pela desenvoltura sóbria dos gestos, pela escala ambiental que reclamavam, fazendo supor o pintor dialogando com o espaço, num intenso vai e vem em face das telas. Além disso, diferentemente da voga tachista que dava o tom no meio artístico brasileiro, eram pinturas que guardavam, sob superfícies de tons sombrios e quentes, um travejamento de camadas e camadas de matéria meticulosamente soldadas entre si (em um cifrado diálogo, talvez, com a pintura construtiva...), o que permite supor a precoce vocação pública dessa obra, como se já se endereçasse aos espaços anônimos das grandes cidades e pressupusesse um observador inexoravelmente à distância."
SALZSTEIN, Sônia (org.). Diálogos com Iberê Camargo. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2003. p. 50.

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  • Title: World Health Organization panel, Geneva
  • Creator: Iberê Camargo
  • Date Created: 1966
  • Location Created: Genebra, Suíça
  • Physical Dimensions: 700 x 700 cm
  • Rights: © Fundação Iberê Camargo
  • Medium: Oil on wood
  • Credit: © Olivier Zimmermann
  • Collection: WHO
Iberê Camargo Foundation

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