[Text] Iberê Camargo: work situated between times

The idea of the man-painter concerns Iberê as a person and the persona he created as an artist. This definition of himself comes from his statement in the book No andar do tempo, “Life and art are mixed together for me”.[1] [...]

The man-painter was also involved in the struggle for art in all its different dimensions, from preservation of its memory and history to the quality of materials and the free circulation of works, together with the creation of institutions for containing them. On issues such as these, Iberê fought with other artists, led movements and took a public stance throughout his entire life. At the centre of it all, although always based on his own work, particularly painting, were improvements to the quality of art. At the core of his self-definition was the stance he took towards his own work, lived as experience, always allowing the possibility of risk and error; but always continued until he got it right, or destroyed it, in pursuit of his best. [...]

Ultimately, it is the work that counts. It is the work that remains through time and is always current, often taking on new dimensions. New layers of meaning are applied to it, depending on the history of the gaze, the values and interests of each moment.

Iberê attacked the surface of his paintings with the brush or spatula. The idea had generally been worked out in drawings on paper. [...] It is interesting to compare the small-scale drawings with the finished painting. Despite the artist’s assault on the canvas, the accumulation and removal of material, the making and remaking, overlaying and scraping, the finished painting often bore a surprising resemblance to the drawings, even though strictly speaking they may not have been preparatory studies. Rather than copying them, the painter established a relationship involving gesture and thought. This included losing control of what he was doing along the way, often seeming to go into a kind of trance. But more than once he commented that at the end of the process “his critical eye” awoke and led him to judge what he had done, to accept the result, correct it, or even more radically, to destroy it and start again. [...]

The work occurs between tensions, which involve all its elements and its situation between different times: the exchange or superimposition of different regimes of representation and the activation or reactivation of paradigms of different times. Which involves the use of pictorial mechanisms that propel it into the 21st century – and is why productive dialogues can be established between several artworks of today and the paintings of Iberê, regardless of the artist’s intentions, without establishing direct relationships, but within common constitutive questions triggered by the works themselves in the diversity and openness of the contemporary setting.

Solitude appears in these paintings at different times, from the empty urban landscapes produced at the start of his artistic career to the solitary human figures in desolate landscapes produced at the end of his life. The paintings in the Tudo te é falso e inútil (Everything is False and Useless to You) series are fine examples. [...] A monochrome blue pervades everything: a nocturnal scene with no depth, in which the flesh of the world is lost.

Considering the process of painting as more like birth than emergence, he would transfer the characteristics of humanity to the paint, a material, concrete body existing in the world. [...] Flesh, viscera, birth, pain – painting is considered like a body and, for the artist, transformed into a body to some extent, a body that hurts but which is just as essential as his own. He sees painting as a being in the world, a pseudo-person, as defined by the poiesis, which the artist’s ethics require him to consider and respect as such.[2] [...]

At several periods in Iberê’s work questions concerning the specific field of painting arise, its unique two-dimensional support, defined by the edges of the loose or stretched canvas: the legacy of western painting, which Iberê used always, like many modern painters. Different from an approach in terms of the expanded field, the concept developed by Rosalind Krauss[3] in relation to modern sculpture, Iberê’s work reveals the constitutive elements of painting within its boundaries, which allow identification and analysis of these works in their specific field. It is interesting to see how the painter tensions and subverts this field, keeping within its traditional boundaries or, at the most, developing it into another painting.

These paintings always exist at the intersection of different time frames, generating tensions that remain in the works. Iberê worked through different times, calling on the classical tradition, whose forms, problems and technical questions he always sought to learn and re-learn. He would understand and strain the memory of the materials, supports, techniques and forms to create a synthesis between the open intersections of art history, recollections and the present action. [...]

Artists like Iberê have addressed these issues of accumulated times since modernity, together with a return to the memories of childhood without nostalgia but as the driving force of creation within a critical process. [...]

The colour range of these paintings, which will often be very dark, almost black, suggests a territory of shadows. This quality of colour, dark tones, obscurity, often resulted from the density of the material: layers and layers of accumulated paint mixed together and becoming darker and darker. [...]

Iberê welcomed darkness in his paintings. Both formal and existential, the shadows created dense, boggy areas, like his view of life and death as a drama. So it appears in the nocturnal paintings in the Tudo te é falso é inútil (Everything is False and Useless to You) series, with a single figure accompanied just by a bicycle or a table of spools and a mannequin, a recurrent figure in the final paintings. The mannequin: looking like a person. What is its role here? A simulacrum of humanity? A fetish, like the mannequins of Bellmer and Kokoshka? The presence of the inhuman in the human, as in the paintings of De Chirico? A symbol of death, the shell of a body, devoid of life and soul? A shroud of a body, like the one in the final painting, Solidão (Solitude)? Perhaps in these pictures the mannequin encompasses all those meanings.

The shadows in these works, the blackness of near invisibility, coexist with light and strong, luminous colours, however, just as the tragic spirit of the painter was always tempered by a degree of distancing marked by the irony that appears in the titles and even the subject matter of some works, together with the formal tendency that always led him to change the course of the paintings.

He approached the contemporary period through a critical revision of aspects of expressionism, yet without embracing neo-expressionism. Shadows pervade contemporary art as a recurring element, not always connected to drama but as a purely formal element.

Sometimes they even take the key role, replacing the figures “in positive”, and revealing a critical distancing that encompasses social issues and the art system alike. By replacing actual objects, shadows question their absence and their role as myths in a globalised society.

[...] In the paintings and drawings he probably began to develop his own end with the Phantasmagoria series. It was not just the individual Iberê Camargo who was coming to the end, but also the man-painter and his work. The paintings became a privileged arena where the artist could express his fears and concerns, his critical spirit and the clarity that was its key feature, and could also control them. Expressing himself, creating until overcome by the denseness of night.

[...] In the year of his death, fighting the illness that would kill him,the man-painter stands in front of a huge white canvas. In his hands he holds the small drawing indicating the figures: three silhouettes sketched in black pencil. [...] What kind of alchemy transformed the bodies in their migration from drawing to painting? How can the almost immaterial, barely a thought, such faint lines, become a painting of such force, full of colour, for which the initial sketch, becomes as always just a pretext?