Iberê Camargo: A trajectory through modern painting and beyond

“Our greatest problem is to make a picture that lasts as a work of art.”
I.C.

Iberê Camargo’s painting emerged in adverse conditions, on the periphery of the periphery of universal culture. In the south, in the provinces, dislocated as much from universal as from national centres. Overcoming this deficiency starting from the limited local conditions themselves and acquiring strong conviction – unlimited respect for high culture, unrestrained admiration for the masters of tradition, full awareness of the need for and standards of artistic training – is the task he imposed on himself to become a painter. It is more than clear that his artistic ambition was aware of the limits of the condition of Brazilian culture, of our backwardness and isolation. These ingredients, a mixture of provincialism and transcendent artistic passion give, I believe, a particular and fundamental feeling to the work of Iberê Camargo that is not found with the same intensity in any other Brazilian artist.

A typically Brazilian structural distortion allied with an artistic ambition like few others, establishes the drive and conflict through which all his work runs: the unresolved tension between the deficiencies of the local climate and aspiration for universal artistic value. This results in his rather solitary destiny within Brazilian art – necessarily solitary due to both artistic attitude and poetics. Expressionism is a rare attitude among us, a minority attitude of the few. Everything indicates that the destiny of the expressionist within Brazilian art is to be solitary. This is the case with Iberê, solitary and also rebellious. Iberê’s rebellion is the sign of an individualistic drive that is ambiguously modern, anti-provincial, anti-bureaucratic, anti-establishment. As an artist, two attitudes act simultaneously in the same man; respect for the tradition of making, for the understanding of established technical means, conventional teaching and, on the other hand, modern innovative drive, without it being gratuitous: Iberê was always a doubter of the avant-gardes, of attitudes that disregarded and scorned tradition. While some took little from historically accumulated artistic wisdom and knowledge, Iberê craved it and sought it. These forces, tradition and innovation that could very well be contradictory, together establish characteristics that were somewhat unknown in this work at this time and place; at first, chronologically late in relation to the development of post-war modern painting and, at the end, fully contemporary with painting at the end of the 20th century. In comparison and contrast we can mention the work of two major painters who continued/innovated tradition and who would have affinities with Iberê; the Netherlands-born North American, Willem de Kooning and the Italian Giorgio Morandi. Both maintained close links with tradition, yet they did not go beyond the modern like Iberê. In a way, everything indicates that it is the late access to modernity that enables these comparisons between works from different periods such as occurred in the 1980s between the painting of Iberê and Jorge Guinle, a comparison between different generations. This is an example of the unusual possibilities of a certain Brazilian historical dysfunction that would be unlikely in other more chronologically hierarchical cultures.

Like few others, Iberê’s work unresolvedly, without deviating from its purpose, but not without enormous difficulties, cuts across the complex historical route of modern painting in the second half of the 20th century and also of post-modern painting where unexpectedly surprising relations and affinities can be detected. Starting with Guignard, passing through the School of Paris, through Giorgio de Chirico, the whole series of influences he underwent, and also what happened in painting in his mature years, pop, minimalism, to the general return to the canvas in the 1980s, all become a huge variety of perspectives with which Iberê must have experimented without being affected. Iberê is a late-modern who reaches the threshold of post-modernity in painting that on occasions seems to be nearer to an Anselm Keifer, for example, than to one of his contemporaries. He is close to the young artists who start from the idea that painting has been completely exhausted, he who exhausted pictorial experience, taking it to its limit. At the end Iberê reaches a “rich poverty”. The oxymoron that defines the nature of the South, and with which the painter existentially defines himself.

Rich poverty, rich desperate aspiration and the awareness of the cultural poverty that has to be overcome. It is a matter of becoming an educated man. The discipline and application Iberê imposes on himself characterise, especially in the disconnected climate of Brazilian visual art at that time, an almost anti-Brazilian method, in contrast to the improvisation, the temporary arrangement that is so common to Brazilian life. He accepts no imitations, demands everything in its most absolute integrity and authenticity. A true, authentic artist, he cannot prevaricate or accept any kind of falsity, starting with the paint itself, the basic element of painting, for which Iberê battled without respite for decades. It is obvious, but not so clear in an undemanding climate, that every painter, and especially one with high demands, should paint with high quality paint. A true sense of craft will then be established alongside vocation, and both remain inseparable, vocation is not considered without with the sense of craft. Vocation without the command of craft is blind, and command of craft without the passion of vocation is empty. Vocation demands a continuous and exhausting perfecting of the craft, so that in the end they are indistinguishable from each other in the virtuosity of the final years. It is still an unresolved, unsatisfied, unappeased virtuosity, being constantly tested, as shown in the constant and interminable making/remaking of the final pictures.

In raising the problem of artistic training in Brazilian conditions Iberê raises his own problem. The accumulation of and saturation in pictorial knowledge will be followed without respite through serious, methodical and proudly acquired learning. It is total involvement in the problem, which is not only technical, since the modern artist wishes to be released from, or to suspend all this training, to which Iberê would not be able to agree easily. Painting, for him, is continuity, there is no separation between modern painting and the great old masters. If there were discontinuity there would be no painting, but something else, completely distinct and unrecognisable. As painting is a way of transmitting experience, one is therefore a teacher, that is, a transmitter. Painting involves full, firm knowledge of materials, of technical means, of the masters, of drawing, of printmaking, that need to be mastered in depth. Clearly, Europe, culturally and geographically will be fundamentally important in this process. Symbolically it is still the great artistic centre and also the major, and probably only, centre of great painting – Iberê never mentioned painting other than European or Brazilian, of which the latter is the necessary consequence of the former. The scale that Iberê gives to this relationship is striking. In fact for him, the painting of the old masters is living material – a challenge and a stimulus – perhaps as for no other painter of his period. We could imagine Iberê as one of the last modern painters to make copies in the Louvre, and we might not be wrong. The huge and, to a degree, slightly conventional and provincial respect that he held for high culture – not only pictorial, as his literary knowledge shows – would be an outdated attitude and position in the European and North American climate of the period. This latter, increasingly influential, post Second World War climate was ignored by Iberê and also by the Brazilian artistic climate. The traditional French influence, of which Iberê saw the decadence while still respecting it, was still unquestionable for us Brazilians. Iberê does not question contexts and influences, conventions or prejudices: he evaluates and distinguishes sure artistic insight above all. And so the educated artist progressively overcomes the provincial man.

Iberê’s painting synthesizes all this array of personal and cultural factors. It results in a highly integrated artistic career, that is, the level of performance is the same, that consequently brings a body of work with few low points, that is all of the same quality, whether in the less or more successful pictures. Existentially, the work breathes a discomfort with certain Brazilian modes of feeling; unease, severity, solitude place Iberê on the other side of Brazilian sociability from the, in theory, “amiable man”. There is no place for his violent, rugged, anti-sentimental, aggressive painting there. Like Goeldi, Iberê tells of the underground “cost” of this existence, of the misery and injustice that are hidden behind such affable social conviviality. On this level, paradoxical as it may seem, Iberê’s violence brings to mind a phrase by Hélio Oiticica(*): “Violence is justified as a sense of rebellion, but never as a sense of oppression”. And rebellion is one of the fundamental, if not the most fundamental drives of Iberê’s work.

Paulo Venancio Filho
Curator and art critic

*    Hélio Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1986, p. 121