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"The effective return of landscape into Iberê’s work will occur in his compositions of the 1980s. These are pictures with fully defined figure and ground, and a high degree of complexity in their conception and development. [...]
Although there is an effective return to landscape during this period, it is not the same as the topographical landscapes of the 1940s or even those nostalgic pictures of the 1970s. Here the landscape has a new function, even when it retains features that can identify places: these are pictures about being in the world and not in a place, or locus, representations of states of mind, ideas about places, but mainly depictions of other internal places: 'the landscapes in Iberê’s paintings of the 1990s seem to be created from within. From inside the painter himself, inside the human bodies in the pictures; as if they were created to fit them.' Some of them include solitary cyclists coming or going, but we don’t know where to or from. It doesn’t matter: feeling is more important than objective information about these broad empty places."
Paulo Gomes, Iberê e seu ateliê: as coisas, as pessoas e os lugares (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2015), 158.