The solitude of great art

The critic should not be afraid to be old fashioned if it is the most direct way of stating: all great art in Brazil is condemned to solitude. The artist has family, friends, colleagues and admirers. His art, meanwhile will be alone. Like our ancestors, we continue to look at and conquer the sea, the horizon, the void. Suddenly an island emerges in the immense ocean of nothingness. This nothingness is culture and its waves of fashion: the liquid surface clearly outlined by continuously multiplying waves of manifestations. However, we lack the courage of the Portuguese. We are not facing a real ocean. We are excellent helmsmen on this anthropological sea. But a solid feature is disturbing. It stands out in the oft-navigated insignificant liquid surface. The work of Iberê is the highest island in the small archipelago of Brazilian art surrounded on all sides by culture. The nearest island is that of Goeldi. Transatlantic theory does not work here; there is not even a port. We have to disembark and climb them. Discover them and inhabit them, and only then one day will they not be deserted, not be alone, and we will tell the story of their discovery.

Ronaldo Brito and Paulo Venancio have both been there and disembarked as well; they did not remain in the distance looking through short–sighted telescopes. Each in his own way told of his exploration. But this did make the island inhabited. It is incredible, but the academic hordes that approached and exclaimed “Oh Iberê!” seemed afraid of coming too close. They had heard that you had to like it and had been educated, in the worst sense, for this: to exclaim “Oh Iberê!” In the sea of rhizomes, fluxes of intensity, virtual cores, hybrids, simulacra et caterva , I will try my own approach.

The painter confronts the canvas, attacking it as no other in the history of Brazilian art. This is the decisive point: no painter has attacked the canvas like Iberê. Painting is literally a battle and a dense and anguished victory. The density and anguish absolutely visible. In this insipid story of art in Brazil, each real artist is destined to be a pioneer; few have this right. Iberê defends to his soul his right to be a painter. There is only one battlefield, the surface of the canvas. Nothing is hinted at. There is no prevarication. Iberê's interest is not in the tangential, and consequently in nothing external. To paint the interior of beings in a world with no soul is more than a challenge, it is a destiny the artist imposes on himself.

There is movement everywhere. The world and the being are unstable. Iberê cannot imagine them otherwise. Existence is not a psychological drama, there is no place for the petite bourgeoisie, their anxieties, their fears, their dread, their sickness, their conflicts, the ever repeating scene in which everything is small. He has an acute awareness of the time in which he lives and the dramatic dimension of existence. At the start the landscapes are unbalanced in form and colour. They are not disturbed like the opening moment of Jaguari , chosen by Paulo Venancio for the beautiful opening page of his essay Desassossego do mundo ( Restlessness in the world)* . There is an interregnum between Jaguari and the bottles and the spools. Santa Teresa, at that time the bucolic district of Rio de Janeiro, is made of distant slopes – leading neither downwards nor upwards – and of colours that have no respect for drawing. Lapa is empty. If Jaguari designs the future, there is an interval between the task being appropriated and it being confirmed in the destiny of the painter.

It is clear that with the spools Iberê becomes inescapable in the history of modern painting. Someone who cannot be avoided. If he was European and alongside Hartung, Vedova or Soulanges, he would be declared a greater example of the extensive form of the best expressionism. Even so, relatively dislocated in time, he would not be disconnected from history, he would be part of a greater and consistent territory. Being Brazilian he is a clearly solitary island. No one comes near him in Brazilian painting. Neither Tarsila nor Guignard. Taking into account the dislocation of generation and his being an immigrant of some learning, there is only one modern painter in Brazil of the stature of Iberê: Lasar Segall. Because it is painting. But Segall is another story of greatness isolated in the wasteland of the province.

In the spool, form is minimal and primary, at worst it is a model. It is there, placed on the shelf or table in the studio. The memory of a childhood toy, according to the artist. The movement of memory regressing to childhood toys is anecdotal . It is worth taking a look at these interesting spools that move on the picture plane. Ronaldo Brito, faithful to the forms, recalls that it is in the nature of spools to roll. The spool is evidently a pretext for the expressionist painter. In place of the social scenes that are so common in the tradition of German expressionism, or an ineffable abstract music, Iberê is taken up by a fragment of childhood memory, palpable and capable of being reproduced, always the same – the spool belongs to the industrial world. Empty, discarded by the seamstress, it is, however, very far from a soup can or beer can and their significant outward appearances as carriers of the signs of merchandise. Neither is it a bottle, cup or glass which, after being used in an arrangement, can be used again. The emptiness of the spool is the same as the disembodied being. A simple and minimal skeleton. The spool, as a model, was useless form itself, a close relative of art. With the spools, the previously unseen and modern attack on the canvas is carried out. Spatula, brush, the paint tube itself convey gesture with a plastic contusion hitherto unknown in Brazilian art. The spool is changed; from resting inert on the table it is transformed in its revolt onto the canvas. In this revolt there is horror and grief. The darkest of nights.

Iberê's work can offer occasion to rethink the question of technique. Language and technique are one here. We are in the centre of the question proposed by Heidegger. Technique not only as an instrument to achieve determined ends, but also as a way of making that unveils what we were not meant to see. The way of making that belongs to art itself. Production that is art. Possessed by the pragmatism and positive thought of science, we only conceive of technique as an instrument, like technology today, and we lose the thread of a knowledge that should not only be associated with ability, competence or efficiency, because it is a knowledge that is only materialized in its own language, and for this reason is capable of concealing the whole being.

Allow me to conclude by quoting a passage from a recently published article of mine:

“There are some etchings and paintings by Iberê Camargo where we see a woman with a bicycle. Let us look at a print. The cyclist is a person who masters the skill of balancing on a two-wheeled vehicle, to the envy of the poor unfortunates who cannot. But at the cost of never being stationary: the condition of balancing, we should not forget, is movement. It is the image itself of the ever-moving being. The person who passes. However, it is not just this physical movement that interests Iberê, nor its metaphor. It is the internal movement between things and men, in this case between the naked woman and her machine, so simple, a bicycle, that are found to be at the centre of the question. In many of his earlier paintings, the spools, which Iberê had played with in his childhood, arranged on a shelf in the studio as subjects in a new still life, are convulsed in constant movement, whether of the knife or brush, the spatula or the paint tube. But here, no.

“In the cyclist there is also another movement: a continuum between the thing and the person; and thus a conjunction takes place in which we cannot clearly distinguish where one begins and the other ends. The same uncertain mark, free from any geometric precision that could be evoked by the perfect circle of the wheels unites a living being with a dead thing, as if they were one. It does not reach the monstrosity of the centaur, such is the delicacy, the frailty even, of the hybrid scribble of the precarious woman-machine, spread over the mark of the etching. It is close to us, as if deformed by its own artistic existence, and finds poetry by going in a different direction to things filled with certainties. It dispenses with atmosphere and breathes its own outline with which it is described on the paper. It has no flesh or skeleton and yet we can see it: it is alive in the grey mark of drawing. Anything surplus has been lost in order to extract the precision from her machine and to impregnate it with her own human nature: that of being at the limit of uncertainty.”

“This woman – the cyclist – who can no longer be represented in the traditional sense of mimesis, or verisimilitude, takes hold of reality by the tangential path of transfiguration. In being conveyed within the same outline of the machine that carries her, she passes humanity to the objects with which she comes into contact. But for this it has been necessary to be divested of the praise for precision and exact forms that in his time were established in praise of the marriage between rationality and art. The price of impregnating the machine with humanity and becoming confused with it, is to be presented as a being without flesh and bone. And Iberê teaches us that the contrary has a price.

“The expressive form that refuses to praise clarity and exactitude – the notable attributes of technical rationality -, teaches us a good deal more. Iberê speaks to us, in the outline and the mark of his drawing in the print, of the presence of a body that is not just gesture but something like a trail that leads to the path of the Being, as if the cyclist and the bicycle, man and thing, were one, at last the world neither here or there, the whole world, being and entity. In art this community, or better, this common unity, between the thing and the man comes from its origins, but in the world it does not happen without an inevitable and hierarchical separation of what is and what exists. Between what is there in itself and the other that gives meaning to it. Bicycle or Mont Saint Victoire, it matters little. Machine or nature, what counts is a form that emancipates from the amorphous universe the relationship with a structure that speaks. Far from being one of the operating rules between the diverse formal elements, distant from the perfection of logical relationships, but in the experience of confronting the real, which will not be the same after the dispute, this structure disturbs those exact vectors of modernity that seek pure reason. The Mont Saint Victoire is reduced to a bicycle, and the eye of Cezanne and his body, into a cyclist. And we no longer know in this print, who is Cezanne and who is the mountain. Iberê, the artist, is complete in that which would be his object. This is the expressive question. ”**

Paulo Sergio Duarte

*    Venancio Filho, Paulo. Iberê Camargo: desassossego do mundo. Rio de Janeiro: Silvia Roesler / The Axis Instituto Cultural, 2001.

**   Duarte, Paulo Sergio. Chega de futuro? Arte e tecnologia diante da questão expressiva . In: Arte & Ensaios – The Magazine of the Post-graduate Visual Arts Programme – EBA – UFRJ. Year IX, no. 9. Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, 2002. Revised version of the same article published in Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva (Org.), Escritos sobre História e Educação – Homenagem a Maria Yedda Linhares . (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad / Faperj, 2001).