Eu (Me)

“An oil painting from 1981 represents his face head-on, as if he had painted it from memory without the help of a mirror. In a staunch affirmation of his subjectivity, he did not entitle it ‘self-portrait’ but Eu (I). The pinks that abounded in his palette in the early 1980s tinge the face with their hues, as it floats occupying the entire breadth and height of the canvas. The markedly heavy black eyebrows are a feature of his more mature later self-portraits. Iberê was 68 and portrayed himself with empty, blind eyes, as if he no longer needed them to render his self-portrait. Without a doubt, he was painting himself from an internal perspective that revealed him as a mask, an enigma, the archetype of man’s unfathomable nature. ‘I paint because life causes pain’, he used to say [...].”
María José Herrera, Iberê Camargo: um ensaio visual (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2009), 99.