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Lot Essay
A stalwart and deeply philosophical painter, Iberê Camargo ranks among Brazil's most compelling modern artists. A student of Alberto da Veiga Guignard, he belongs to the generational cohort--among them, José Pancetti, Cícero Dias, and Candido Portinari--that congregated around the Vermelhinho Bar in Rio de Janeiro during the 1940s. Camargo studied in Paris and Rome between 1948 and 1950, gaining fluency in School of Paris aesthetics under André Lhote and important exposure to the enigmatic poetics of Giorgio de Chirico. The intense, expressionist undercurrents in his painting took root following his return to Brazil, and over the following decades his work moved between abstraction and figuration, mediating existential questions through the physical reality of the canvas surface. "The density of the material he uses in his work, the obstinate repetition of themes and artistic solutions, [and] the churned-over material" may be seen, Mónica Zielinsky has explained, as "a way of articulating his experience of being in the world."[1]
Camargo's decades-long analysis and transfiguration of the spool, recalled from childhood memories and his most iconic subject, culminated in the fraught, introspective space of his late paintings. "The spools and the handful of forms which seem to derive from them throughout Iberê's career--prisms, dice, hourglasses, phalluses, eyes, anus, female bodies, bicycles and all sorts of elements for suggesting motion or a dynamism of organic forms--become," Sônia Salzstein has suggested, "a topos in the artist's painting."[2] The cognitive valence of the spool--domestic and autobiographical, formal and semantic--is amplified in the present work by the game-play implied by the dice, which introduce a new element of chance into a dense matrix of forms.
Dice figure prominently in his paintings from this period--e.g., Cubos inquietantes (1982) and Dados en movimento (1983)--and their symbolic weight may have held additional, private meaning for Camargo at the time. In December 1980, he was attacked in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and killed his assailant in what was judged the following month as self-defense. Although he was acquitted, the human drama of that period may have played a role in Camargo's continued, contemporary shift toward more explicit figuration and in his removal to Porto Alegre in 1982, where Visão was painted.
The vagaries of life are brutally abstracted in the dark palette and convulsive space of Visão, whose title suggestively problematizes the nature of painterly vision and intuition. "The artist can use any theme as a motif if he is capable of transforming it into art," Camargo once remarked. "The content of the artwork is the existential experience of the artist as objectified in the work."[3] In the present work, rows of spools and their various mutations, from dice to fish, are set against a deeply resonant, ruddy background, their shapes indicated by heavy black lines. A meditation on time and chance, morphology and memory, Visão embodies the conceptual complexity-- and no less, the psychic struggle--that lay at the core of Camargo's painting.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Mônica Zielinsky, quoted in María José Herrera, Iberê Camargo: um ensaio visual (Porto Alegre: Fundaçao Iberê Camargo, 2009), 98.
2) Sônia Salzstein, "The Absence of the Spools," in Iberê Camargo: moderno no limite, 1914-1994 (Porto Alegre: Fundaçao Iberê Camargo, 2008), 123.
3) Iberê Camargo, quoted in Herrera, Iberê Camargo, 98.
Camargo's decades-long analysis and transfiguration of the spool, recalled from childhood memories and his most iconic subject, culminated in the fraught, introspective space of his late paintings. "The spools and the handful of forms which seem to derive from them throughout Iberê's career--prisms, dice, hourglasses, phalluses, eyes, anus, female bodies, bicycles and all sorts of elements for suggesting motion or a dynamism of organic forms--become," Sônia Salzstein has suggested, "a topos in the artist's painting."[2] The cognitive valence of the spool--domestic and autobiographical, formal and semantic--is amplified in the present work by the game-play implied by the dice, which introduce a new element of chance into a dense matrix of forms.
Dice figure prominently in his paintings from this period--e.g., Cubos inquietantes (1982) and Dados en movimento (1983)--and their symbolic weight may have held additional, private meaning for Camargo at the time. In December 1980, he was attacked in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and killed his assailant in what was judged the following month as self-defense. Although he was acquitted, the human drama of that period may have played a role in Camargo's continued, contemporary shift toward more explicit figuration and in his removal to Porto Alegre in 1982, where Visão was painted.
The vagaries of life are brutally abstracted in the dark palette and convulsive space of Visão, whose title suggestively problematizes the nature of painterly vision and intuition. "The artist can use any theme as a motif if he is capable of transforming it into art," Camargo once remarked. "The content of the artwork is the existential experience of the artist as objectified in the work."[3] In the present work, rows of spools and their various mutations, from dice to fish, are set against a deeply resonant, ruddy background, their shapes indicated by heavy black lines. A meditation on time and chance, morphology and memory, Visão embodies the conceptual complexity-- and no less, the psychic struggle--that lay at the core of Camargo's painting.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Mônica Zielinsky, quoted in María José Herrera, Iberê Camargo: um ensaio visual (Porto Alegre: Fundaçao Iberê Camargo, 2009), 98.
2) Sônia Salzstein, "The Absence of the Spools," in Iberê Camargo: moderno no limite, 1914-1994 (Porto Alegre: Fundaçao Iberê Camargo, 2008), 123.
3) Iberê Camargo, quoted in Herrera, Iberê Camargo, 98.