Tudo te é falso e inútil IV (Everything is False and Useless to You IV)

"[Tudo te é falso e inútil (Everything is False and Useless to You)] is the name of a series of works from the 1990s which take their title and inspiration from a poem by Fernando Pessoa, Vem, noite antiquíssima e idêntica (Come, Oh most ancient and identical of nights). In this poem, the night, wise and eternal, that saw the gods come into being, smiles because 'everything is false and useless for it.' The figures in the work strike a pose from the image evoked by this verse, women like the night, both in this series and another related one called As idiotas (The Idiots). The palette of colors is also reminiscent of the symbolic hues of night: blues and the silver-white of moonlight. The twilight of a spent day, the twilight of life: these works allude to an existential indifference which the painter revives in worn-down figures who smile with all the bland innocence of a newborn. However, in their smiles we do not see the wisdom of night but rather the blank grin of the alienated.
The material thins, becoming watery. The figures appear deformed, against thick backgrounds, like palimpsests, overwhelmed by ancient traces of bicycles, carts and mannequins, all from Iberê’s repertoire of symbols. In Tudo te é falso e inútil IV (Everything is False and Useless to You IV), 1992, the Idiot woman watches the carts falling from the table with an indolent smile."
María José Herrera, Iberê Camargo: um ensaio visual (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2009), 100.

“[...] In the painting [Tudo te é falso e inútil IV (Everything is False and Useless to You IV)], which is considered to be the synthesis of his work, we have the fundamental landscape of his work, an indiscernible place in the background of the painting, but with the unmistakeable presence of a reddish star, the monumental and imposing human figure, which was always present (but not always visible), and finally a still life, a table with objects. But it is an impossible table, on which a variety of spools struggle to remain stable. It is a dynamic still life, denying the nature of a genre marked by stability and motionlessness. A restless still life, observed by a passive, inert spectator, with reluctant motionless arms and indifferent to the dynamic setting, both internal and external, of the surroundings.”
Paulo Gomes, Iberê e seu ateliê: as coisas, as pessoas e os lugares (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2015), 151.