Sober, convulsive
Taísa Palhares
In this series of works by Ricardo Homen, representing around six years of production, something calls our attention, that we might, paradoxically and in a precarious way, name ‘vibrating sobriety.’ Looking at them as a whole, even at those pictures with a more variedtonality, where the colors seem to blur into each other in certain easiness, they reveal the persistence of a structure that tries to organize the surface, by combining vertical and horizontal areas, or by using geometrical figures. At the same time, in recent paintings, of dark and reduced character, where this organization imposes itself in a slightly more affirmative manner, it’s impossible not to perceive the reluctant kind, by what the colored mass gives way to the imposed limits of this alignment.
Like colors of an expressionist matrix, the ones used by Ricardo Homen, are neither light nor volatile. Quite the contrary, they possess density, they are strong, and thus, they impose a certain resistance to the one, who tries to influence them. In history of painting, this type of color-material relation has always favored, on large scale, the affirmation of an exacerbated and explicit gesture of subjectivity of the one, who has tried to dominate it. Here, however, the actions seem to follow the more or less rigid limits of a geometry that, by its part, responds in a tender alignment to the revolt of these colors. Therefore, neither the yoke of mathematical reason (in the way of a geometric-constructivist abstractionism) nor the gestural movements, without any limits to a self-reliant subjectivity, seem to survive.
Actually, in these works of Ricardo Homen, there‘s an equation between these terms. For example, the dynamics, that moves them, can be observed in pictures with a reduced palette, where the surface is almost exclusively dominated by black and grey, intermixed by an incarnate yellow and a vivid red, sometimes lightly orange; the same in the drawings. Analyzing them, we get the impression that the reasonably determined limits between the contrasting masses are under continuous pressure. The convulsive nature of these hot colors does not stop vibrating, infiltrates the dark masses, thus opening scissurs that carry energy to these monotonous areas, in order to remove them from their heavy horizontal state. But these last ones do not cede so easily, their viscosity causes a certain disruption that retains, for a short moment, the total infiltration of light.
But, if this kind of attrition, which, by the way, can also be observed in the more colorful pictures, points out to a constant redefinition of space and relations among the colors, all this happens in an extremely deliberated way, without any big explosions. Although this geometry has not been imposed, it contains a kind of control, but certainly non-authoritarian. In truth, it is like, as if there was an agreement of mutual determination, wherein the painting is being formed.
It ‘s like, as if we were still listening to an endless dialogue between the artist and his material, these surfaces seem to illustrate the slow and mediated process, by which they were shaped. Somehow, we may say, that their structure is temporary. Thus, we are repeatedly invited to imagine their unfolding into another alignment, potentially present in the picture, as if there was a latent and appeased movement in there, instantly, just for a moment.
Bye the way, adding another point, one should mention the spatial doubtfulness in some paintings, where horizontal lines suggest an aperture, a dark deepness, that calls us to penetrate and to get lost, and, at the same time, from where we are continuously expelled by the vibrating effect of verticality of the yellow stripes, that take us back again to the surface.
If daily challenge consists in finding a compromise between the certainty of inflexible imperatives and the surrender to an unlimited spontaneity, exclusively submitted to the impulses of instinct and sensations (it’s worth mentioning; the two sides of the same coin, which in their radicalness appear rather ingenious to the contemporary ear), in a certain way, Ricardo Homen seems to have found it. In their pulsing sobriety, these works reveal that they can be a possible and indispensible equation that, however, needs to be reaffirmed every single day.