In this text, critic Márcio Doctors provides an in-depth analysis of the work of artist Ivens Machado. Doctor’s interpretation goes beyond conventional readings of Machado’s work that overwhelmingly tend to revolve around the erotic and the use of unusual materials. What strikes Doctors about Machado’s production is its systematic engagement with visual memories, therefore resisting forgetting. Doctors states that “the images that the artist produces are not restricted to the visually decoded limits of the unlikely, the grotesque, and the erotic. Above all, they are amoral, forlorn, and maverick images. Ivens’s visual intelligence resides in the dislocation effected by the idea which is then brought to bear on the work as idea. This is the source of its power as it speaks of absence by indicating presence.” In Doctors’s view, Machado’s work exceeds purity despite the conceptual nature of the artist’s approach.

Art critic and freelance curator Márcio Doctors was the private secretary of Mário Pedrosa, a major Brazilian theorist, politician, and critic. He also wrote on art for Rio de Janeiro-based newspaper O Globo. He is currently the curator of the Fundação Eva Klabin Rapaport in Rio.

Ivens Machado first became known on the Brazilian art scene in the seventies following a show in the Project Room of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) and participation in a group of artists doing work in video art. His work has been characterized by exploration of materials.

In a text written in conjunction with Paulo Herkenhoff and Anna Bella Geiger [see the ICAA digital archive (doc. no. 1110602)], Ivens Machado asserts that the Project Room [at MAM-Rio] played a major role in the art scene of the seventies (specifically from 1975 to 1978) when it housed projects that questioned and explored a range of artistic languages and media. In the text “Projeto para um texto sobre o trabalho de Ivens Machado” (doc. no. 1111209), artist Milton Machado, along with G. L. Gilbert, provides an overview of Ivens Machado’s artistic development from the time of his first show at MAM-Rio in 1973 to his participation in the XVIII São Paulo Biennial in 1987.