Ricardo Nomdedeu RICARDO NOMDEDEU Barcelona, 1957
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Ricardo Nomdedeu RICARDO NOMDEDEU Barcelona, 1957 Between half and late 19th century the pictorial motifs seemed to disintegrate. The artists explored the outdoors and painted the effects that the light had on the landscape and figures; they were interested in the different moments of the day and to give the feeling of liveliness and reality. They were the Impressionists. [...] With the Nymphéas of Monet the dissolution of shapes as spots of light and colourrea- ches its apotheosis. He painted them very late in his career, when in other parts had appea- red the abstraction of Kandinsky, with his First abstract watercolour and his Improvisations. Ricardo Nomdedeu part of this tradition, and at this point, he already passed by American Action painting and European abstraction as Pollock, Clyfford Still, Sam Francis, Juan Mitchell, Wols, Hantaï… There is an explosion of lines, stains and dripping with multiple evocations in his work: sometimes we think in a pond with aquatic plants, sometimes in a garden, sometimes in a clearing of a forest. When it becomes liquid and slides by the painting we think of lianas in the jungle or jets of water falling by walls of moss. The vibrating colours –Nomdedeu not only dares with difficult green but makes green his primary colour- it evokes exotic flowers, with its intense red and yellow scattered throughout the picture. The blue and lilac give a counterpoint and suggest depth. Sometimes the lines become restless, dancing all over the surface, all the painting is set in motion and then we think about his admired De Kooning. But there is also a less idyllic side in this work that the artist himself has titled Metamor- phosis. It is about a bucolic reality that disintegrates, explodes in flashes of colour in which a horizon or outline doesn´t exist. Yes, it is an all-over, that way of composing invented by Monet and continued by Pollock: a painting without any hierarchical structure where everything becomes as important. Or is it the symbol of a contemporary reality where there is no eternal truths, the principles are fluid and nothing seems understandable?The viewer should interpret. Victoria Combalia La metamorfosis de Ricardo Nomdedeu SOLO SHOWS 2019_Moonwalker, Galeria N2, Barcelona. 2017_Galeria Km 7. Saus Camallera (Girona). 2015_Metamorphosis, Galeria N2, Barcelona. GROUP SHOWS 2018_Colectiva “Blanco y negro Vs Color” “Perico Pastor&Nomdedeu”, Galeria BCN Art Difusion. Barcelona. “Formato 0”, Galeria Km 7. Saus Camallera (Girona). 2017_Colectiva “Pequeño Formato”, Galeria BCN Art Difusion. Barcelona. 2017_Negro, Galeria Km 7. Saus Camallera (Girona). 2015_Swab International Art Fair, Barcelona. 13-Nº121, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 130 x 80 cm Nº 9, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 160 x 80 cm 16 Nª205, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 130 x 80 cm 17 Nº 201, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 160 x 80 cm Nº 16, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 80 cm 9 Nº 69, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 50 cm Nº 22, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 65 x 55 cm Nº 78, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 100 x 81 cm Nº 301 + 322 (dyptich), 2017 Acrylic on canvas 120 x 280 cm press clips Selection [...] Barcelona painter Ricardo Nomdedeu (1957) waited a long time before deciding to show his work, which he has been toiling at now for decades. “Metamorphosis” is Nomde- deu’s first solo show, and it’s striking that the hasn’t had one before. This sometimes occurs in poetry but it’s rather uncommon in painting, an activity that, at least until recently, could be lucrative. There are more secret poets than secret painters. In fact, there are many ar- tists with long career paths and works of far lesser value than the paintings of this artist on display in the N2 gallery. For Ricardo Nomdedeu painting has never been a professional activity requiring exhibitions and sales. Rather it’s something more akin to devotion. So was poetry for a schoolteacher named Antonio Machado or a man with the face of a clerk named Fernando Pessoa. Nomdedeu’s paintings are abstract. They are part of an Expressionist lineage identified in the West with Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and even Henri Michaux, one that stems from the aquatic paintings of Monet’s final period. Actually, the origins of this artistic line are more distant in space and time. The all-over paintings of the pioneer Tobey, his splendid “White-Writings” that saturated the entire canvas with lines like a thicket, drew inspiration from Japanese Zen art, itself inspired by previous Chinese paintings. Ultimately it was Pollock who had marketing on his side. Drawing upon Tobey, he sold the invention as his own. The paintings of Ricardo Nomdedeu, whose late debut is accompanied by notes written by Victoria Combalia, are fluid, watery and plant-based. His brushstrokes and spots of color seem to dissolve rather than disintegrate. The works depict indefinite landscapes with an am- biguous depth of field but can bring to mind blurred forests or gardens reflected on the water. More than anything, they communicate the fluid and chromatic nature of painting itself.The idea works because the colors are well rendered. Green predominates, combined with reds and blues on a white background, with touches here and there of more mixed colors. Juan Bufill Los lenguajes del arte La Vanguardia, April 6, 2015 A “Metamorphosis” of strokes and matter at the N2 gallery. Ricardo Nomdedeu astonishes with neo-expressionist canvasesin his first exhibition. An expression of rain, flames, wind and flowers. One painting flows like the troubled waters of a river splashing the canvas in a cascade of color. Another entangles and twists like jungle vines, overlapping like Amazonian vegetation. This is the work of Ricardo Nomdedeu, an intuitive, impulsive “jam session” of a pure color and matter. Ricardo’s work is very suggestive and connects with the new trend of neo-expressionism, German abstraction and French impressionism, all mixed ina hip-hop shaker”, explains Josep Antón Carulla, director of N2, who uncharacteristically has taken a chance on a new artistwhose day job is that of a lawyer. And the bet is paying off. Days before the show’s opening several paintings have already been sold. Nomdedeu’s canvases are abstractions. But behind them lurk landscapes, jungle nature, rivers, forests and sunsets. Even his small square paintings suggest short visual haikus such as cherry trees in bloom, fireworks on a summer night and a moon peeking out from behind a mountain. The painter combines the density of matter, leavingbrushstroke traces visible, with delicate and subtle blurs. “The contrasts strengthen light and depth”, says Nomdedeu. “To paint these abstractions I drew a lot of classical subjects, a lot of Greek sculptures. Drawing teaches you discipline, which you need to achieve the compromise of painting and then break the ru- les”, explains the artist, invoking several classical examples. “I’m interested in painting that can be described but not explained. From Leonardo I learned to distinguish between good and evil; from Velazquez that time doesn’t pass, that it doesn’t exist; and from Pollock that destroying is the same as creating.” And like Pollock or de Kooning a red spot that could be a flower or a skull is deconstructed in order to create a material explosion. Vanessa Graell El gesto del color y la pintura El Mundo, 26 may 2015 The exhibition is titled Moonwalker. However, I think that if the paintings of Nomdedeu have something of a lunar walk, it would be rather because of the feeling of weightlessness, of liberation of gravities and sorrows that they express and transmit to the observer. I have the impression that this exhibition could also have been called Carpe Diem: enjoy the days. The tone of these works is mainly celebratory, but after the musicality of the strokes and after the richness of their chromatic games, after the impulse of vitality that they express, one also divines the possibility of the dissolution of matter and emptiness. And that fluid and empty space is not necessarily negative. It expresses the transformations that already pre-So- cratic philosophers like Heraclitus knew how to name. The pictorial code of these works is that of abstract expressionism, in a sensual and poetic, baroque and contained line that relates them to the best paintings of Cy Twombly. And I was not surprised to see Xavier Grau at the inauguration of Nomdedeu, another expressionist painter from Barcelona with a work rich in movement and vibrations. The exhibition of re- cent work presented by N2 is both more mysterious and more precise than the one that took place in the same gallery in 2015. Juan Bufill Disfrutar de los días La Vanguardia, March 14, 2019.