I begin this text with a song that somehow resided in a corner of my memory and resurfaced after a conversation with André: "I sent to whitewash my mansion / I sent, I sent, I sent / I sent to whitewash it yellow / I whitewashed, I whitewashed, I whitewashed! / Yellow that resembles gold / Gold that is my berimbau / Gold of a gold cord / Beetle, Beetle, Beetle." I also venture a small poem by Adélia Prado that has accompanied me for a long time and which, not by coincidence, the poet calls "Impressionist": "Once, my father painted the whole house a bright orange. For a long time, we lived in a house, as he used to say, constantly dawning." These memories, born from conversations filled with songs, poetry, whitewashed facades, lights, and tempera, also paved the way for us (for him) to the title of this exhibition: LuzCaiada. It is with these memories that I approach one of his paintings: A background in a washed green. A green that is earth. That resonates with a green in stone, slate, transparency. In the center of the plane, a structure also has its base in shades of green, now more marked, darker. Although I know that this form is part of the artist's refinement from the record of one of those spotlights used for stage lighting, I dare to go beyond what is known: The structure, as it rises to the top of the painting, seems to transform into kites. Kites indeed! But they could also be those party balloons from rural festivals. What I know is that they seem to fly on the same axis. But there's something more! A set of shapes seems to turn towards my kites (or balloons). Like small comets made of layers of tempera dripping in blues, greens, and pinks, they seem to be drawn to the central structure, as if everything were part of the same gravitational force. Everything seems the result of an instant. Sometimes it seems that the shapes that have the same color as the background emerge from it. Everything is ethereal. I learned from the artist that this liquefied density is like the paint whitewashing the plane. Whitewashing as residents of rural or suburban areas do when they coat with another type of lime those facades of houses that make the streets a particular experience of color. A light that emerges from the lime. A LuzCaiada. This title is born at the exact intersection of method, poetry, and memory. LuzCaiada, all together, plays at inventing something that seems to evoke a movement, a way of being color, light. The name also reflects a particular way of handling paint, the support, and the painting. Above all, it functions as an invitation to understand painting as a place of encounter with oneself and accessed memories that originate from the artist and reverberate in the other. I invite those who read me now to follow me on a path that leads us in a long circle that starts from the centrality of André Ricardo in contemporary Brazilian painting and will bring us back to this light that arrives in this exhibition. * This is the first time I could dedicate myself to a longer piece of writing about the work of one of the contemporary Brazilian artists who most moves my thoughts about painting. When I am with André Ricardo's works, I think of unsubmissive poetics. Unsubmissive to any attempt at quick apprehension. A work that does not negotiate its freedom to be what the artist establishes as the guiding thread of his creation. André is present in many of my notes prior to this moment. He has also been an indispensable artist in my curations. Following André Ricardo's work over the past few years, this young artist from São Paulo, whose roots touch a city in the interior of Pernambuco, has always captured me with the way his production features a profound labor and commitment to a language that accepts no concessions: the craft of painting. We have lived in a time when painting is alive amid its historical cycles that foretell its death and eternity. With this marked presence, I have encountered many painted images, but a much smaller number of paintings. I explain being a painter is far beyond producing images. To be painting requires dedication to a continuous process that involves not only seeing but also listening to what the painting itself demands. It is not just about making a painting; it is about being with it and the questions that the support and pigment themselves require. A game made of losses and gains. A place where error is also a path. In this, André is incomparable. I spent a few hours in his (methodically organized) studio and found myself in front of an endless sequence of sketchbooks filled with drawings and notes that extend over time, paintings that advance over all the walls, daily hours of work like a laborer in the fulfillment of his craft. Let us not forget that when we stand in front of his canvases, we are also witnessing the survival of a technique that is not common and has its roots in an ancient history of painting. It is from the same tempera made of egg, water, and pigment found in the paintings of Giotto and the Renaissance that André Ricardo's painting is made. A procedure that comes from long ago and whose origin lies in the term "temperare." That is, to find the right measure, the precision. I learned from André that tempera is more than a mixture of different substances; it is, above all, a discipline. A knowledge that only reveals itself through a method developed with continuous work. Knowledge developed with the same discipline as a boy who, upon entering university, faced with so much new information and paths, decides that he would only find himself if he could think about his production in the key that is the center of his craft, and which emerges in one of his statements: "Painting is thought and discussed by painting." Thus, in the early years of his training, Ricardo positions an easel in front of a university studio window and spends months and months painting the same landscape. The view of the building in front of the window, he tells me, echoed the mountain of Cézanne's Saint Victoire. See: being with this artist is always the possibility of a great painting lesson. These readings and references that reside in his training period were also the path to mastering the history of modern and contemporary painting and thus surpassing it in his poetics. André exhausts the senses of the canons by pushing them to their limits. As he tells me himself: "Hammering the walls of painting concepts to find his own." Then, on the other side of this wall, the light that intrigues us here began to emerge. A luminosity that, before reaching the surface covered with tempera, begins with an internal movement. There, the geometric form, sometimes arid, sterile, dry, gives way to a painting that resides in a more deeply hidden place. Forms that were kept there in the memory of this artist who understands that painting is also a way to access oneself. A path to find one's own identity. André reminds me, in one of our emails/letters, of what one of his main references, the artist Eleonore Koch, said: "The theme of my painting develops from a glance: a moment when an image from the outside world coincides with the existence of such an image inside me, never before perceived in visual terms." Very familiar forms like a cart, a boat, an angel, which are the results of a visual intelligence that accesses elements surviving in the memory of Brazilian culture and, therefore, with elements that owe much of their meaning to the black presence. With this statement, I also want to introduce another point that occurs to me whenever I think of André's painting: the possible liberation for a contemporary black artist. André Ricardo's painting, in my perception, adds to a set of works by black artists whose keys are not given solely in a set of themes and reading places associated with a specific repertoire of images and practices that would be delivered by the key to race. When I mention this key, I am referring to the idea that, in front of any work by a black artist, there would be a racial theme that precedes and surpasses the very formal elaboration. This trap often obscures the particularities of each investigation. It produces a dangerous snare that tends to feed fetishes, besides being used to hierarchize a certain type of white-Brazilian production as superior in its formal dimensions, for example. There is also, and here comes the liberation produced by artists like André, the idea that a black artist should only address such black themes. A dynamic racist and limiting. A black artist produces what he wants. What I have been trying to think of as the right to form is open to these artists. That is, to poetize the world according to their artistic particularities. This notion simultaneously highlights that Afro-Brazilian art is the art produced by black Brazilian artists, regardless of the poetics or stance they adopt. There is another point: the idea that every identity debate must occur from purely figurative images with the protagonist of the represented black body. This shallow reading also establishes a criterion that tends to prioritize a particular type of figurative black artistic production as more "authentically black." The elements of a preconceived idea of what is quickly recognized as black have shaped the market's taste in the last decade. However, this same market, which filled collections with this type of painting, seems to be rehearsing its own exhaustion of this formula. Most of the time, the problem is not necessarily in the works, but in an artificially created demand, which tends to obscure those who do not fit this model. Here, once again, comes the sharp process developed by André Ricardo. In his paintings, the boundary between representation and abstraction is ever-present. André paints at a time when these definitions are not mutually exclusive. More important than choosing between one or the other is the ingenuity with which he uses them to open a space where we can access memories that are also ours. See how complex the works exhibited in this exhibition are. But not a complexity used to produce something hermetic, cold, distant. These paintings are complex because they contain a set of sensitive geometries resulting from the refinement of forms from the world. In this artist's game, geometry is also a sensation of the world. An affective geometry that is never hard. It is ethereal, luminous. With his works, André has been creating a language. A kind of vocabulary made of forms that, as I told him, also remind me of a musical structure. In front of them, it is as if the facade, the spotlight, the serpent, the parapet, the gate were like musical notes: although each has its particular sonority, when they come together on the plane, they compose melodies that are unique and follow the artist's direction. In this sense, André has been playing with forms that repeat in his work and articulate within each painting. Their own meanings are gathered in different compositions, in arrangements that are always new in their pictorial quality. Let's look at an example from his studio: On the wall, next to the painting I mentioned at the beginning of this writing, there is another. The forms are the same: there is the structure that makes me see kite and street party balloon flights while comets orbit in its magnetism. However, in terms of painting, nothing is the same. André tells me that this second one functions almost as an antithesis to the first. There is another density. The red, full of nuances between figure and background, makes the yellow, orange, and blues vibrate in a completely different way. A Prussian blue that can sound like black to an eye that does not allow the necessary time to rest on the canvas. The central axis makes density and transparency coexist in chromatic vibration. It is similar in form and completely different in composition. Similar, but as are the uses of a vocabulary all its own, all his and, thus, all ours. There is no way to think about this production without remembering another artist who, in the repetition of a certain set of forms, composes his own alphabet: Rubem Valentim. There is a letter from André to Rubem, written on the occasion of an exhibition in London, where the two conversed through their works. In the poetic text, Ricardo tells him that his youngest son is also named Valentim. Also in this letter, the proximities of the two are evident in the words of the Paulista to the Bahian: I have the feeling that your forms and colors echo deeply and speak of a circular sense of time, in which there is no room for a chronological order [...]. [...]. I like the idea that the exercise of art is a way to make the way back to a primordial place. I remember how revealing it was to realize that painting is like making an internal journey, casting light on a painting that I already carry. In André, as in Rubem, the forms are not mute. Beyond the constructive dimension, there is a form that speaks, that has its own primary meanings, reworked from each one's poetics. Rubem calls his alphabet Kitônico. Will André's alphabet have a name in the future? The first painting André tells me about is a facade. In it, blue lines that can sound like a gate open to an area in yellow that seems to light up with a sun that lives somewhere. Above, I cannot help but see a moon that sprouts from the center of a double-headed ax of Xangô. The moon is crowned with stars. I know those are lines, areas of color, and circles that choreographically organize themselves on a plane. But I also know that they also reside in the memory of the forms that compose Brazil itself. I know they are nestled in the memory of this unique artist. I also know that by sharing this light with us, he invites us to inhabit a space that is also ours. The best art is like that: individual and collective. Particular and general. One must recognize the greatness of the artists who reach this place. Artists like André Ricardo, who, with his usual delicacy, allows us to understand that the LuzCaiada of his paintings also bathes us. Igor Simões Art Historian and Curator