“Life could sometimes dawn in an extraordinary truth.”

João Guimarães Rosa. As margens da alegria (The margins of joy, 1962).

In the beginning of “Water and Dreams” (1942), Gaston Bachelard distinguishes between two types of imagining powers: the first ones, he writes, “get their impetus from novelty; they take pleasure in the picturesque, the varied, and the unexpected.” The other ones, however, “plumb the depths of being; they seek to find there both the primitive and the eternal. They prevail over season and history.” This latter type, which Bachelard dubs material imagination, seems invariably interested in the solid waste of dreams, in either reminiscences or visions – but, at any rate, in elements that lend some tangibility and a symbolic character to experiences from the realm of transformation (and not of form, which is closed unto itself). Often, as the French philosopher himself recognizes, this type of imagination lets itself be attracted by the fluid nature of water, the matter of the transitory, of the unstable, but at the same time of density, of depth, of mystery. Before we are born, we live immersed in a water sac, and upon water, huge boats sail. In water we bathe, but without ingesting it, we could not exist. It is not by chance that André Ricardo’s recent output, as precisely as it responds to Bachelard’s definition, is so marked by color transparency. This paint, thin and ill accustomed to shade, achieved by adding a surplus of water in preparing the tempera to be applied to the linen, is a result of his patient and ever-renewed study of whitewashing technique, performed by mixing a portion of quicklime and a large volume of water onto the façades of rural houses. As such, his painting takes place, first and foremost, in the materiality of the pigment decanted on the once hydrated support, as one can tell from the drips over translucent areas, from the irregularity of the porous masses of color, the gesture of a painter who has entrusted to the liquidity of becoming an important part of the artistic decisions made upon the canvas.

His tireless quest for a specific light capable of (con)fusing plane and cloth through a thin matte-colored membrane would encounter in Ilha do Ferro – a small village in rural Alagoas, by the banks of the São Francisco River – the work on woods from the Caatinga, porous-looking and stable (like the mulungu and the umburana), that tend to float when laid on water. Just like whitewash painting retains a certain precision in flaws, subverting, through the passing of time, what would otherwise have been an error, the rustic wood, with a rough surface or an irregular layout, offers itself to André Ricardo as a laboratory in which to study deviation from the dogmatism imposed by the straight line, while sticking to the rigor of well-found form. The tortuous layout of the dead trunks, roots, and branches breeds furniture that waives the saw and sandpaper (called upon only when – and if– needed), the polished surface, calculation. Through the roughness and organicity of the rustic surface, he absorbs what the blotch has also taught him: the tactile quality of incidental form, that which is born of the nonrational, teaches us to reassess our relationship with time. The time it takes for the blotch to dry up, which may eventually turn into something else, replicates, on a smaller scale, the sedimentation of the trunk over years in nature. On the deep as well as on the shallow end, this is about drying time, ushered in by the white-winged dove, the bird Luiz Gonzaga sang about, whose migratory movement acts as a barometer for the environmental catastrophe. Its departure – “Even the white-winged dove flew away from the hinterlands” – is ultimately self-desertion and the announcement of an extreme dry spell cut short by its return, which Gonzaga also sang about, as he turns the bird into a symbol of cyclical time, of life triumphing over death – “And the white-winged dove hearing the rumble of thunder.”

Birds, like butterflies, are staples of André Ricardo’s paintings. The birds are usually Hiera-like, their frontality so substantive that it conciliates their iconic ascent and their planar manifestation. Perhaps thus is their oneiric dimension born, as if they were always ready to perform a certain oracular role, or at least a power to see through, like a window, i.e., a device with which to view the outside while being inside, in a protected environment. Such is the case, for instance, in “Mensageiro da Manhã” (Morning Messenger), a painting that breaks the news of a certain obscure domesticity, informed by the vigil announced by light that invades the darkness through the bird’s body, with the same invading power as that of the beam of light that shines through the door lock (which harbors the soul of a window). In turn, butterflies are more delicate, not as carved up or dense, but more vaporous and lighter, a sign of the utter abandonment of their crawling past, which remains alive in serpents as an anatomical reality, as the telluric inheritance of the twisted branches and as the inevitable fate of those who know they will always straddle the dry and the soaked.

In the work of André Ricardo, serpents impose themselves as a symbol of metamorphosis in transit, the same process whereby the butterfly makes its way into the world. For that same reason, they hold a mystery that partly stems from ophidian poisoning, potentially lethal, but also from their exceptional ability to transform, to renew their skin (ecdysis), through which they grow, heal their wounds, and remove external parasites. In between the two layers, the older, outermost one and the newer, innermost one, there runs a liquid (the exuviae) that hampers their eyesight, which seems transposed into a plastic quality here in André Ricardo’s aqueous painting. Going from image to experience, the serpents also nod towards the essential, towards synthesis, towards economy of material, achieving the same effect as the sculptures of Ilha do Ferro artist Aberaldo and the work of the São Francisco River master carranca makers do by ridding the form of excess, causing the wood to revive what some medieval theologists called quod necesse est, i.e., the minimum necessary for a thing to exist as such.

Although they transit through opposing energies, what serpents (on the ground) share with birds (loose in the air) is the ability to place oneself in the world as a symbol, encapsulating such archaic information that they seem to be outside time, even though they can enter it with the enigmatic ease of one who crosses the portal of dreams. André Ricardo also works within that same realm: by reaching into the underground of images for what remains latent in them, he causes to emerge into the visible world the yet tenuous light of the wee hours of the morning.

— Renato Menezes