Estrutura em movimento 5 (Structure in Motion 5)

"Between 1961 and 1962 a group of seven engravings called Estrutura em movimento (Structure in Motion) was produced concomitantly with the Fiadas de carretéis (Rows of Spools) paintings.These oils and engravings continue to exhibit the rhythmic movement of the spools in space, which was present in previous works. The objects are now aligned in a horizontal cadence and plunged in utter darkness. The oils are almost completely black, their surfaces thick with paint. The engravings are similarly impregnated with profound darkness, generated by dense meshes, brushstroked modulations of aquatint, acid shad ings, and applications of pitch; yet smoky areas stand out from the denser ones through the employment of lavis, which Iberê used to achieve a balance in the irradiation of light.
[...]
These engravings are among Iberê's most representative, and not only because of the history of their circulation in the world of art. They represent the moment of maturity in technical mastery and in the dense charges of expressiveness. The ever-growing tension in his work now achieves its apex: sinister, sinuous movements come from the depths of the darkest spaces in these prints. The spools quiver, but so does the abyss whence they came. 'I have drama in my soul', he declared. And this tragic meaning is born in the crisis of the subject, for though 'an individual can go deep inside himself, he will always find shadows at the bottom, unsolvable mysteries'. These works appear to interrogate the place of these shadows and the mysteries hidden under surfaces of mourning, as Mário Pedrosa referred to them.
One assumes that the idea of mourning mentioned by the critic might be charged with a deeper meaning than that of loss. Because of the type of conception and special treatment of these engravings with regard to the occasionally illuminated planes of the 'spools', a force field is revealed. The way lberê treats the relationships within the very space of these engravings, its discontinuity from the forces that emerge from the dark depths, the
negation of positive visibility (which also occurs in the paintings) remind us of another position of the subject adopted by Iberê. In this group of engravings, the works leave the continuous extension of traditional representation. On the contrary, they bring instability, a sense of anxiety, a refusal of fixity, for their power resides in a perpetual insurrection, one which Iberê will carry onto to his final work.
From this perspective, Estruturas em movimento (Structures in Motion) are engravings which, when carefully examined, reveal the anguished traces of a philosophy dissociated from any vestige of the humanism present in the artist's earliest sketches. Far beyond an expansion,
they now reach the fatal energies of the soul, the fateful reality of the subject in crisis."
Mônica Zielinsky, Iberê Camargo: catálogo raisonné (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006), 93-95.