Ivan Campos is the son of radio broadcaster Cícero Moreira and Gercina Braga Campos, an embroiderer and state employee. As a child, he spent a long period hospitalized for tetanus, during which day his mother gave him drawings made on small scraps of paper. Campos kept them all and as soon as he was discharged, he began to draw vegetable and human figures that served as models for the embroidery done by Gercina. During his childhood, he also collected comic books whose images were used as references for his decals.
It was with these materials at hand - scraps of paper and low-cost comics - that Ivan Campos learned to draw in a self-taught fashion. His work in painting came later, as a young man, characterized by meticulous formalization and indicative of years of learning to draw. From the beginning of his production to his most recent phase, the artist finds his motif in his surroundings: the Amazon rainforest, with its rivers and streams, mystical aspects of his experience with ayahuasca and interior scenes are some of the most frequent. In his paintings, Campos does not aim for a naturalistic representation of the forest, but rather reiterates the inseparable link between perception, memory and imagination.
In shallow depths, the pictorial space is densely populated by animal figures, various plant species, graphics and shapes that tend towards abstraction. Only a few of these beings are found in the Acre forest, the rest are transported from other forests, real or imaginary, to inhabit this imagined nature. Campos' painting presents a fantastic vision of the closed forest characterized by high interspecies interaction in which the notion of the forest ecosystem overflows into the painting. In this way, shapes and colors are mutually shaped. In his works, the experience takes place within nature through the overlapping of various dimensions - biological, marvelous, mystical, ancestral; as well as the formal, chromatic and visual elements that are a measure of Campos' experience of the natural world. In the artist's own words, “I can say that I combine color and form, often the color hides the form and the form hides the color. That's why the viewer needs to move closer and further away”.
His first solo exhibition took place in 2000 at the Galeria de Artes do Sesc-Acre in Rio Branco. In 2005, he won a gold medal at the 1st Salão Hélio Melo de Artes Plásticas, an event organized by the Associação de Artistas Plásticos do Acre (AAPA), for his work Alicerces da Terra (Foundations of the Earth). In 2005, two of his works were selected for Projéteis de Arte Contemporânea, part of the Rede Nacional de Artes Visuais - Redemergências: uma das abordagens possíveis de um novo olhar sobre a produção artística atual, organized by Funarte/RJ. In 2012, he was featured in the Trajetórias – Artes Visuais project, with an exhibition of his works at the Galeria Chico Silva at the João Donato Usina de Arte. In 2018, he received the insignia of Knight of the Order of the Star of Acre, an honor awarded to personalities who have contributed to the development of the state or played a decisive role on behalf of the population. In 2024, Ivan Campos was selected for the 38th Panorama Atual de Arte Brasileira, held by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.
