"Without gods or monsters, art would not be able to represent our conflics, Rothko further declares. With these words, he remembers that the familiar identity of things must be demolished in order to destroy limiting, restrictive associations. This artistic stance was
always of essential concern to Iberê's work and home to its great inventiveness, for his last works (the Ciclistas (Cyclists), Idiotas (Idiots) and Manequins (Mannequins)) take on specific configurations: the faces and conception of the figure acquire conformations of impersonality. These quasi-caricatures hide silently behind masks, from within which emerges all their loneliness and incommunicability. Bodies are rendered in sparse, bold lines, whether in the incisions of etching or in the use of aquatint, they remind us that the physical reference has little value. It is the vastness that comes from the essence of these beings and their true distancing from the world of things which now matters more than anything else, which makes this period of Iberê's work his greatest synthesis."
Mônica Zielinsky, Iberê Camargo: catálogo raisonné (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006), 111.