Boxer Print

Eternity's nostalgia, reality of ephemeral; ... Now - This! HôgenYamahata Gestures, souls, pieces of lives trapped in other places, contemplate us... In these works of Ricardo Paula, we found a multiplicity of narrative universes, left open. Desire is the leading thread that bind and defines them, creating emotional places of different densities and complexities. In a pictorial discourse, where the tension of the drawing cohabits with the strong and vigorous brush stroke, the artist stages his stories. Stories without time, peopled by melancholic figures, silent, belonging to an imagery which has been building and allows him to create intimate relationship points with the observer. Ricardo Paula's painting has, in that way, the capacity of establishes an intimate commitment with our memory or with our memory's nostalgia. Each painting is a beginning to a story, which hypnotically leads us to the scene's intimacy. We overwhelm, and are overwhelmed, by infinitively familiar characters, and with them we start a journey deep into ourselves, redefining the image of an ancient occurrence, recreating the shadow of an emotion yet to live. Lisbon, January 2008 Luísa Lopes I confess that I've been following, with all interest, works of this author, moved by curiosity of wanting to know where it'll end. There was, in his painting, a certain "arrangement", a certain reference to the immediate truth of figures and, one day, I even wrote he would experiment portrait. But Ricardo Paula's painting is demanding to live far more from interrogation and experience than from effort to arrange it on the inside and then transfer to canvas all that "arrangement". Ricardo Paula's paintings are today, visibly, places of experiments, where the artist rehearses hypothesis of analysis and reorganization of the human being that pretend to reveal also how we are on the inside. We have a very regular vision of the human being and the nature has only entered in the "initial model", some changes that individualize and make possible its identification. Ricardo decomposes it all and gives us an example of our real complexity, beyond our apparent uniformity, because one of the curiosities of this painting is that it does this game from the human figure, which calls our attention for the complexity and immensity where, through the body, the being is expressed.