ABOUT THE COVER
The considerable change in Iberê Camargo's cyclists
Mônica Zielinsky
Professor, Institute of Arts, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, RS. Responsible for cataloguing Iberê Camargo's work, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
Inspired by the sunny mornings at Redenção Park in Porto Alegre, unpretentious sketches of cyclists run across the blank sheets of Iberê's drawing pads. Several of these sketches, including also waste pickers and musicians, populate these files of drawings, being impossible to predict their fate at that moment.
Changing their original ordinary and actual condition, these characters undergo a considerable transfiguration: the transfiguration of art, since they stop being mere documents and become a representation, a requirement of art. Iberê Camargo loads them with his expressive talent when he turns them into painting. Through these characters, Iberê releases his inner unshakable existential anxiety. These cyclists, overloaded with pictorial material, move aimlessly searching for the meaning of life. They leave that original trivial condition of cyclists who pass through the park and undertake the tragic void. Their shapeless faces with undefined look play a relevant role in the artist's work. Their bodies, structured by whitish paint, mimic the way aimless walkers move when they dive into the great vacuum evoked in all Iberê's paintings of this period.
Autobiographic material is strongly present in Iberê's paintings produced since the late 1980's; the red skies and the bluish bodies evoke the dusk, since the artist is aware that due to an incurable disease this sunset is not elicited only while dealing with art, but such characteristics are symptoms of a real fact. Iberê knows that his life is approaching an inevitable end.
"Cyclists" shows that "what really matters in an artwork is what it makes us see or listen to" (free translation based on the Portuguese version of the text).1 And in this process, such kind of painting establishes a subtle movement from life toward art and from art toward life -- from the drawings of Redenção to the predicted death. This movement sets the thinnest and most delicate border between life and art, shining some light on Iberê Camargo's amazing pictorial poetics and making everyone aware of it. Such poetics restores the perception of life, but in a singular and considerably transformed manner.
References
- 1. Beardsley MC. Aesthetics problems in the philosophy of criticism. Indianapolis: Hackett; 1958. p. 31-2.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
17 Mar 2009 -
Date of issue
Dec 2008
