The encounter between Iberê Camargo (1914-1994) and Miguel Rio Branco in this exhibition justifies the choice of the title Huis Clos, alluding to an oppressive world with no emergency exit. In both cases, we are dealing with creators who possess a rare awareness of the tragic. Not the drama, but the tragedy. Iberê Camargo endured an existential experience that led him, in the final period of his life, to paint a series like As Idiotas, weak figures violently cast out from social interaction. Miguel Rio Branco captured the weight of this decay in images, turning his gaze toward outcasts and social rejects.
However, the connection between Iberê and Miguel Rio Branco is not merely based on a thematic convergence. Although internationally renowned for his photographic work, Miguel began his career as a painter. To this day he continues to paint, as evidenced in Huis Clos. The exhibition features rare paintings from the 1960s, as well as recent watercolors and paintings, in addition to unpublished works closely related to the universe of Iberê Camargo. Two tragic figures in the tropics.
As a counterbalance to the tragic weight of both artists' works, the exhibition also includes furniture designed by Jorge Zalszupin. Many of these pieces were originally created for this house—his residence.
The playful spirit that inspired Zalszupin to design lighthearted pieces such as the Dinamarquesa armchair, the Vintage bench, and the Capri side table, playing with the creation of geometric shapes in empty space, is striking. Zalszupin was a prime example of overcoming tragedy—he was a Polish refugee, persecuted by the Nazis, who discovered, in Brazil, his place in the world.
It is important to note that Iberê himself started out approaching things playfully. One of his recurring themes is that of the "spools," childhood toys that led the painter from figuration to abstraction. There is at least one historical example of this transition in the exhibition: the painting Fiada de Carretéis (1961), dated the same year Iberê won the award for best national painter at the 6th Bienal de São Paulo.
From the 1960s onward, Iberê’s painting underwent a material densification. Despite using less crepuscular tones in the 1970s, he still resorted to palette knives and a dark palette during that decade.
The exhibition includes several oils from the subsequent years, signed by Camargo. Comparatively, Miguel Rio Branco’s early paintings, created in the 1960s in New York, employ a similarly dark palette to depict a less glamorized side of the North American metropolis, that of neighborhoods marked by urban erosion.
In these early paintings, Rio Branco foreshadows what he would later explore in photographs anchored in cinematic editing. There is a close connection between the images of these New York buildings and the slums that would be portrayed five years later by independent filmmaker Hal Ashby in his debut film, The Landlord (1970), photographed by the also debuting Gordon Willis (of The Godfather and Manhattan fame).
This anticipation only accentuates Miguel's visionary gift, as he also worked with cinema, employing the syntax of editing both in his paintings and photographic installations (an undeniable proof of mastery in this language is the historic work Entre os Olhos, o Deserto, which incorporates materials ranging from rusted iron to peeling walls). Created in 1997, this work can be seen in the artist's permanent pavilion at Inhotim.
In this exhibition, Miguel makes direct references to artists of his affinity in works like the photographs Azul (a tribute to Yves Klein) and Morandi Perverso. In both cases, a tie is created to reality through pictorial signs—the blue created and patented by the French artist Yves Klein in 1962, and the bottle from Morandi’s still lifes, iconic in his work.
Other artists of reference for Iberê and Miguel could be mentioned, but it suffices to cite Goeldi as a paradigmatic figure in both artists' pictorial imaginations. It is Goeldi’s decomposition of the world that interests this duo, a world very similar to the work in silk Hell’s Diptych by Rio Branco, a metaphorical representation of the huis clos of Sartre’s play of the same name and, why not, of his most famous line: "Hell is other people."