Ricardo Homen
José Bento Ferreira
Colors and darkness fight a fierce combat in these pictures of Ricardo Homen, as if the luminous forms tried to return to that dark ground where they had emerged from. This movement engraves into every picture traces of its formation, the marks of its making. The dark ground either shows through, or seems to be repelled by the colors.But it can never be completely overwhelmed by them, as, without this latent darkness, the proper colors do not exercise their formation process. Schiller, in his letters on ‘Aesthetic Education’, describes evolution from the night of nature to the light of form, like the victory of the Olympic gods over the Titans. Hölderlin, therefore, shows to Jupiter in his poem ‘Nature and Art’, that all his power derives from Saturn “like from the clouds his lightning”.
In Ricardo Homen’s pictures, the dark ground acts like the titanic force in Hölderlin’s poem; it “announces what the holy crepuscule is hiding.” Even there, where luminous yellow seems to subjugate the darkness in the inferior part of the picture, attacking it with a subtle thread of light, it’s exactly but from this darkness, where all its luminosity comes from. In the interpenetration between light and shadow resides its interdependence, and through this clash, these forces gain their life. The Yellow alone would not be brightness, neither the Black just darkness. The gestures of this clash appear in the strokes of brush like marks of a corporal fight. Or of a love scene…