Los Meandros de la Memoria (The Meanders of Memory)

Los Meandros de la Memoria exhibition captures the essence of Iberê Camargo's body of work and confers a leading organizing role to memories. Nostalgia has been present in the life of this artist since childhood, during a period in which the immense solitary landscapes of Río Grande do Sul were etched in his mind, along with the railroad tracks that ran across the distance and the telephone cables that outlined the limitless space. The lonely passerby, the globetrotter that walks along a path leading to a vanishing horizon, are metaphors for mankind's existence. Like the globetrotter, the artist faces a solitude strengthened by the inexorable passing of time. "Time transforms the things we love-said Camargo-and takes us away from that garden of our childhood we aspire to return to." French curator Jacques Leenhardt proposes a visit to Iberê Camargo's memories with an exhibition that marks the 15th anniversary of the foundation named after Camargo. The 72 works¿26 paintings, 39 drawings, and 7 engravings-will be on display until April 3, 2011, on the fourth floor of the institution located in Porto Alegre. To develop the project, philosopher and sociologist Jacques Leenhardt-director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, and president of the International Association of Art Critics¿tirelessly studied a large number of documents, letters, interviews, and literary texts. The book of memoirs by Camargo, entitled Gaveta Dos Guardados (Memory Box) was, in particular, a source that guided Leenhardt's curatorial approach. Authored by Camargo, the book was recently relaunched by the Cosac Naify publishing house. According to Leenhardt, "the relationship with the past as a happy place already gone, confers the melancholic tone to one of the most consistent and solitary pictorial proposals in the Brazilian painting of the last fifty years." For Leenhardt, Camargo's search into his past is evident in every theme developed throughout his career and until the time of his death in 1994. The curator retraces the great moments that marked the rhythm of this artist's evolution, particularly during and after his study period in the 1940s, in Rome, with Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico. According to the curator, "the environment that existed during De Chirico's metaphysical period-from 1910 to 1920-will impress Camargo to such a degree that he will adopt it as his own discomfort and will use it to develop from then on many familiar themes. In my opinion, the long period of interaction with De Chirico is as important to Camargo's art as is the technical processes he was able to learn from the Italian artist, and much more important for the formal evolution of his production than the courses he took in Paris with André Lhote." In Iberê's own words, ¿I feel a great affinity with De Chirico because he also addressed the solitude and mystery that surrounds all things.¿ In this exhibition the curator gives special importance to the drawings-most of which will be exhibited to the public for the first time. According to Leenhardt, "they reveal, in a spontaneous way, his tragic vision of life, as they also show the artist's dissatisfaction with finishing the works. Camargo relies on design to free the works from the definitive and lethal presence that invades the finished work." In the series Os Carretéis (The Reels), Leenhardt tries to show the loss of stability-predominant in the beginning-that is transformed into disequilibrium. The curator also underscores the role of the manikin: "half a living body, half a mechanical body, between life and death." Likewise, to address the equally important role of the self-portraits, Leenhardt adds, "Iberê always tried to record his own image. He rendered it with a dynamic pen technique-like in the self-portrait that appears on the cover of the exhibition catalog¿that ends with the impossibility of reproducing a definitive image. That is because we human beings are just to...