Linhas abertas (Open lines)
José Augusto Ribeiro
A work by Ricardo Homem is always a construction. Since the onset of his career, in the 1980s, his drawings, paintings and reliefs have emerged through the assembly of structures, through the articulation of two or more elements. In the making of his earliest works, for instance, Homen frequently built up successive layers of paper and pigment, using collage-based procedures to lend physical density to the support and to achieve richly textured painterly surfaces through the accumulation of material. At the same time, frameworks of vertical and horizontal lines proposed systems of order for these surfaces, which nevertheless persisted in vibrating with chromatic stains, metallic gleams, and the irregular contours of their own expanses. In this context - that, among other developments, embraced the gestural and vividly chromatic painting of a younger generation of artists while critically reassessing the constructive traditions established in Brazil in the 1950s - the artist positioned his practice with a distinctly painterly intelligence that asserted itself through drawing, its rigorous process of elaboration reaching simple and direct results, yet also dense, irregular, and charged with expressive vitality.
From that point onward, geometry became a constant in Homen's work. Yet his practice has never surrendered its ways of thinking and making to the methods or precision of mathematics. Rather, what defines Ricardo Homen's body of work is the internal logic of its own system of production whose constructive yet intuitive logic produces compositions that are both concise and unstable. For three decades, until 2010, Homen worked primarily on paper. Throughout this period, he produced an extensive work that, despite its diversity, is sustained by an underlying unity through a vocabulary composed chiefly of planes and bands of color. As a visual language, it occupies a space between painting and drawing, combining investigations into the material presence of the image, chromatic intensity, gesture, and luminosity, while pursuing with the deliberateness of a designer of systems, a visual synthesis that is reinvented each time (whether organized through modular elements or stripes, through rows and columns of parallel brushstrokes, short or long, monochromatic or marked by chromatic contrasts). Over the past fifteen years, a succession of experiments with materials and procedures—new to the artist's practice and distinct from the others—has also expanded the modes through which this body of work is presented, both in its physical constitution, as the artist brings fabric and wood into his working process, and in its modes of occupying space, increasingly assertive in establishing its position within architecture.
Ricardo Homen’s first solo exhibition in Salvador presents works produced since 2019, extending the investigations initiated a decade and a half ago toward previously unforeseen directions. The exhibition gathers paintings on canvas and reliefs that share a common foundation: operations that bring together, juxtapose, stack, interlock, and overlap fields of color or three-dimensional objects. Most of the artist’s recent paintings present themselves, in this sense, as constructed unities, firmly holding blocks and bands of color arranged side by side or one above the other in articulations that seem to exert a force of compression or static friction across the surface of the painting, as though they were, in fact, solid forms.
Removing one element would cause the framework to collapse. At once, within this geometry of hand and wrist, without ruler or tape—the filling and contours of the forms remain irregular, revealing the movements of the brush and leaving gaps between one component and another. These openings, in turn, draw rigidity out of the visual elements, lending the image a sense of malleability and virtually softening its forms. It is also for this reason that the shapes sometimes appear to throb, pulse, become sponge-like or tilting. Through solutions of this kind, the work has, since the beginning of its trajectory, undermined the presumed severity of geometry.
This becomes even more evident in the wooden reliefs that Homen began producing in 2013. To begin with, in these works Ricardo Homen constructs, with polygons, structures whose balance appears unstable. Composed of square and rectangular elements, these pieces are composite, resulting in heterogeneous arrangements and unconventional configurations—a kind of fractured geometry that does not conform to the rules of symmetry. Even so, the work does not relinquish elegance in its presence or aesthetic refinement. The interplay of planes that each of these structures establishes among its parts heightens the dynamics of the composition, as the components advance or recede in relation to one another, to the wall, and to the viewer’s space. Color does not merely act within this movement but are decisive to it, through its hues, saturations, and luminosity. And because of their configuration, cut out, irregular, these objects ultimately absorb their surroundings into their field of action, incorporating emptiness into their own domains.
Working with woodworking techniques further reinforces the constructive principle that underlies Homen’s work, while at the same time seeming to open up new freedoms within its processes. The production of these pieces now involves procedures that are new to the trajectory of the work. It encompasses everything from preparing each individual element, the cutting and sanding of the wood, sometimes its covering with canvas, the preparation of the fabric itself, before the painting can finally take place, to the assembly of the structures with glue, nails, and fitted joints. The handmade dimension of the work has expanded, as have the number and variety of procedures involved. At this point, it is worth recalling that Ricardo Homen has maintained his craft as a frame maker since the mid-1970s, before he even began his career as an artist. And together with this expansion of possibilities, the work moves toward a more liberating condition. It gains in openness and porosity. It extends into the surrounding space and comes into direct contact with those who encounter it (without mediation, without even the boundaries of a frame, for example) whether by reaching the scale of the human body and architecture or by inviting more intimate encounters with the viewer. As a result, these works have altered the way the artist installs and arranges his pieces in space, allowing for a greater freedom of distribution across the wall, rather than necessarily placing them in a line, side by side. He positions them at varying heights, above and below eye level. Many of the reliefs have a playful appearance; they are allusive and witty. They evoke toys or suggest animal forms. They have beaks, wings, and tails, and some recall crawling creatures that seem to climb the walls in zigzag patterns. Others resemble the façades of houses, with doors or windows. They bring to mind colored pencils, oversized matchsticks, measuring instruments... Ultimately, they are composed of a geometry that is not only sensitive and humorous, but also increasingly defined by open lines.