 |
|
|
| |
Iberê Camargo: An experience of painting
The idea of a unique experience, shaped by an individual, which unfolds over time in the thickness of the sensory world under the influx of shifting webs of emotion and memory broadens into a phenomenology that supplies us with the guiding thread that articulates this segmentalization of Iberê Camargo’s work, as a reflection internal to painting. At the same time, its subjection to the "truth of the painting", turning the work into a correlate of the body, discloses the extreme vulnerability of the artist who reveals himself in doing, in the radicality of an expressive act, while allowing us to view the work as a dramaturgy of painting. An oblique mirroring that at some point ought to have been an experience.
Rather than an “experimentalism of painting”, the experience here points not only to an experimentalism of form, the phenomenality of the sign, but also to the existence in which the work itself is rooted, a peculiar way of “being in the world”, of venturing into new places, of attempting to capture form with a diversity of techniques, of making use of different poetics. If, on the one hand, it incorporates a narrative of subjective events and states into an existential poetic that makes the dramaturgy credible, on the other hand it claims a dense and untameable materiality that inhabits the work and brings to the foreground the aesthetic experience in a "consummatory" sense that borders on the ecstatic, adhered to the body and magnetized by its significations. It is as a quality of such an experience that we can say that Camargo’s work distills an aesthetic.
The aesthetic texture of experience, or rather the aesthetic quality as correlative to a quality of experience, is therefore a decisive aspect in Iberê Camargo’s work. The voluptuous materiality of his paintings, or what De Kooning referred to as the "carnality of painting", a legacy of the Renaissance, is derived from this aspect. It sets him apart from most artists in the avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century who subscribed to the Rationalist Constructive movement or Geometric Abstraction, which deliberately downplays affective and sensory aspects and the history of art itself in favor of the objectivity of form, or from Duchamps epigones who reject painting itself in favor of an idea of art.
Unlike them, Camargo reveres tradition by retracing a genealogy of painting that sees the work placed in its vortex as a fictional reconstruction of cultural memory and tradition. Guided by elective affinities, his learning process translates into an adventurous search for a subject in the margins. Here, the invention of a sui generis pictorial language in tune with the spirit of the avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century is informed by an erratic learning. As if it was necessary to first foray into unknown territories or set off in aimless, labyrinthine wandering to recognize oneself in the world. From the emptiness of the southern plains to the modern Rio de Janeiro of the 1940’s and 50’s to the Europe of the great masters. From the classical art (Vermeer, Ticiano, Goya, Rubens, El Greco, Velásquez, etc) that he diligently copies at the Prado and the Louvre to the modernist influxes of Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard e Rouault.
A crucial encounter on this path was Guignard, a teacher who experienced painting as “the tradition of the bottega”. The time spent with Lhote, De Chirico, and Pettrucci is also a defining influence. But his synesthesia with other artistic practices is evident: Morandi’s poetic of intimate spaces, American Pictorial Abstraction (particularly De Kooning and Rothko), and even certain elements of Dubuffet’s Informalism and Giacommetti’s poetic of solitude. Like them, Camargo is faced with the modernist legacy – the plane and its density – and his challenge is to equate the ambiguity where the figure now gravitates while sustaining the overt opaqueness of surfaces. What matters is how the painting is perceived/dealt with: he is still concerned with re-elaborating space in a different register, as a dimension bound by temporality, imbuing the medium with expressiveness and reinventing the figure as topos.
In dissonance with the constructive rationality that dominates the Brazilian cultural scene in the 1950’s and 60’s, Camargo seems to very diffusely take in the Neo-Concrete trends anchored in perception, declining the modernist agenda of rationalism and pure-form positivity. Shaped by the intentionality of gestures, his forms incorporate sensuous rhythms and tones manifesting the phenomenality of the pictorial sign and revealing how his prolific experience related to the experimental field laid out by modern abstraction and the primacy of the plane. In an important segment of his process, which could be considered a passage to Pictorial Abstraction, from the still-lifes to the spools (and finally to the Núcleos), everyday objects (fruits, jars, bottles and tables with spools) are progressively reduced to more elementary signs such as spools, cubes, dice, etc, that are broken down into outlines, edges and planes, disclosing their structures but not giving up the thickness of the pictorial matter. This sequence, focusing on the intense dialogue between paintings and etchings to which he applied highly pictorial techniques, illustrates how formal experimentation was accompanied by a rigorous technical exploration.
In the Carretéis of the 1970’s, a vibrant chromatism (blue, cadmium red, black and white) visibly belies a concentration of active forces that charges against the canvas with an energetic, aggressive physicality. By creating incisions as if opening grooves on a surface in a strained effort, he extracts the form hidden in this matter. In Tudo te é falso e inútil, Ciclistas and No tempo (1990), Camargo turns the canvas surface into the skin of the painting, for abstraction here means nothing more than a return to oneself, self-reference, confinement to one’s own means and expressive potency. Matter becomes rarified, the layers of paint are diluted and the emaciated, slight figures are stretched on the plane. The dissociation of the outline, as in Dubuffet, gives the line the autonomy of graphic sketches and so the figure appears as a print – an inscription on the pictorial matter.
But it’s in the series of spools that we can see more clearly a vertiginous morphogenesis of form/figure. These hesitating, unstable signs that only coagulate for a few fleeting moments are continually reprocessed in new combinations that mark the abstraction that is so characteristic of these paintings. If Cubism is concerned with capturing an object’s multiple faces, Camargo’s paintings evoke the transforming power of a pictorial language that recombines images, reprocessing their grammar while at the same time revealing mythologies and implicit meanings. The spool, after all, has an aura: it’s still the toy that’s buried in the garden of the artist’s childhood.
The last phase of Iberê Camargo’s pictorial work (1984-1994), darkened by a liquid melancholy, ties these visual reflections together. The works narrate a moment of meditative introspection, a period of harsh, direct confrontation with existence marked by nihilism and disenchantment. This showdown with finitude is eloquently manifested in the growing radicality of pictorial procedures and in the thinning of the spectral, tortured figures that emerge from deserted spaces in the paintings. These deep and intangible spaces are not real, but metaphysical. As in De Chirico or Rothko, they envelop us and put us in contact with the mystery of a supersensory reality, expanding the exasperating, insurmountable distance to reality. Here, his pictorial dramaturgy engenders rhetorical operations that question the viewer – space dilates and overflows the boundaries of the canvas like a cloudy atmosphere, a twilight that invades the "real space" to create an ambience.
|
|
| |
|
|
