MIGUEL ÁNGEL RICARDEZ

The art of painting is constantly opening new paths. Skillful and propitious means allow fresh continuity, an ongoing awakening through those that take on all the magnificent opportunities which painting itself provides. It is hard to believe that, in these conflictive and brutally materialistic times, favorable conditions for painting can even arise. This quiet and reflexive art form is capable of breaking through the thorny jungles of today’s visual arts.  The latter have been convoluted and disoriented by our contemporary ways, where money and ignorance are concurrent with the humanities and the arts.

The arts serve to protect us from the vortex that absorbs the disaffected masses; masses who spin helplessly in the wrath of alienation cyclones (tornados). The art of painting has always had the regal opportunity to either remain isolated or take an active role in humanity and society’s history. The daily struggle necessary for painting, in all its forms, offers us the opportunity to employ the defining certainty of its strength.

The opportunity to enter the work of Miguel Ángel  Ricardez brings about much joy.  Through his talent, consolidated during his extensive search into painting, his work offers the viewer vast landscapes in the art of observation. These recent paintings combine, through eminent compositions, fragments of other painters’ work fused with artistic invention. Within the dimensions of a long tradition, yet in conjunction with fleeting innovation, a renewed complex is obtained.

This ensemble has the properties that link good painting with its kin the contemporary context: material investigation originating in traditional means, then updated with the introduction of unorthodox mediums.

Compositions immersed in the pattern of an intelligent syntax, refined and elegant…To create under these parameters seems unusual today. Our context, the world of images that surround us, is overwhelmed by the obviousness of coarse and explicit representation. His divergence positions Miguel Ángel Ricardez as an outlander that resists the buffeting of conditioning forces from the masses who float along mainstream. The intension of Ricardez’s work has been validated through his artistic reflections, these in turn, satisfy every painter’s desire. An endless search that ends only at the arrival of the absolute…the aim of painting appears.

These paintings reach the world of objects and find their place when they are shared by those who can perceive and feel the qualities that lie bellow the surface of their pictorial base. Their permanence in the world of visual arts is an objective that Miguel Ángel has treated with serious determination. This guarantees us that his ambitions will be met by way of us, those who have the grand opportunity to contemplate this phase alongside our painter.

  Ignacio Salazar

Beyond what is real

I

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream and gave him a flower as proof that he had been there, and if upon waking found that flower in his hand ... then what?

Jose Luis Borges. The Flower of Coleridge


In The strategy of appearances we can see that Miguel Ángel Ricárdez approaches the dream to bring back the Rose of Coleridge made ​​paint, glazes and perceptions of another reality in which we live without proper notion, and by which we are also inhabited.

His work faces and combines two equally real worlds, one of the imagination and other of facts, and becomes dazzling because it allows us to glimpse the secret spot where the two come into contact.

II

Faced with the inability to grasp reality, I establish a distance with it through my painting. I walk away from reality to create my own world and relieve the distress caused by the inability to capture it ...
Miguel Angel Ricárdez

"What am I? Who am I? Who is the other? In these questions, to which all initiations respond in advance, are the basis of any symbolic device, "says Marc Augé in his book God as object.

Ricárdez juggler of the symbols, works eternal mysteries to squeeze the last drops of an ever elusive truth yet always present in his insinuating translucency.

The pictorial elements of his work indicate the change and play their game of unveiling: "the juxtaposition of narrative and ideas are due to the irrational logic of associations" and "the ideas that are in the air without explanation reinforces the feeling that we capture all in a kind of unfolding. "

Here the theme of the double is unfolded and crosses a double cause of the instinctive world, as simultaneous flows, line and surface, without any hierarchy connote that assessment.
Thus, the author proposes a change of perspective that is centered on painting and appearances as two opposing forces that are magnetized to each other.

III

With words we daily made our understanding of the world around us. The cosmogony of each one of us is limited or expanded by the size of their vocabulary.
Luisa Valenzuela, Literature and secret

In the triad artist, work and viewer, conjugates the magic of the reading process of a work, where reality becomes more real. Not be factual but to be more understandable from angles that form a hidden track and, as such, passable. A footprint that at times may approach the other, to the ungraspable and ineffable secret of life and death.

Who accesses its vocabulary through painting will perceive the beat of the indecipherable, as interpreted according to its own scale and pass it along to other different and deferred forever, probably as " objects full of feelings and emotions from events silenced, materialization a nostalgic fiction, preserved and evoked by memory. "

No doubt when we see and read the paintings of Ricárdez gradually we are opening overlapping universes, where everything questioned, suggested or whispered takes shape and demarcates the contours of what is and is not, always different for each reader.

Every reading is a process of deciphering because all writing is when it respects it silences and amorphous laws of ambiguity.

The words, while unrepresentable masks, veil while reveal.

Indira Sánchez