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“A drawing from 1970, from a time before cyclists first appear in Camargo’s work, underlines how constant was the artist’s interest in this theme of equilibrium as an emblem of the tragedy of being human.
The scene shows a circus tent circumscribed by the curve of a cycling track. [...]
This image immediately makes one thing of Calder, that other master of the mobile/stable opposition. Camargo’s grotesque world is a circus, at once tender and tragic, a theatre in which ghostly figures, whether static or mobile, make their appearance. Men or women, clowns or marionettes, they may be failing to grasp their destinies, but their destinies are none the less catching up with them. The proliferation of theatrical or circus costumes reminds one that Camargo’s painting is always a representation of life, if a displaced one; of a carnival where the actor – and here is the paradox – is playing at being himself.”
Jacques Leenhardt, Iberê Camargo: os meandros da memória (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2010), 109.