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.
Juan Bufill. “La Vanguardia”, March 14, 2019
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-Socratic 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 recent work presented by N2 is both more mysterious and more precise than the one that took place in the same gallery in 2015.
Now that painting has returned to the major international scene, we see in a new light the reinterpretations of all kinds of abstraction. Geometric, gestural, lyrical, monochromatic abstractions reappear, and emerge as revisions of those antecedents of the great abstract authors of the 20th century.
GESTURE AND COLOR IN THE WORK OF NOMDEDEU
The gestural abstraction has a long tradition and it would not be unreasonable to recover a text from the surrealist José Pierre talking about his origins and background, which places the first automatic drawings in Victor Hugo, goes through the abstraction of Kandinsky, reaches Masson and Miró and ends in Pollock and his dripping.
Because gestural painting and automatism are not synonymous, although they can go hand in hand in many cases, such as Ricardo Nomdedeu’s. His works are produced very spontaneously, although he studies the colors of his palette, he has a very personal technique to reach his forms, but the process is fast and in it randomness plays a predominant role.
Nomdedeu showed us in his first big exhibition in N2, three years ago, some vegetable evocations made of spots and drips. Now, with the maturity that has given the passage of time, follows a similar line but with greater subtlety and greater mastery of its technical resources. Some more compact stains, of strong colors like red, green or black appear suddenly fragmented by a trail of paint completely diluted as if a fatal rain wanted to destroy the vegetation of the garden, or as if we saw it through a glass completely soaked in water. There is something deliquescent in some of these canvas and nevertheless, also vital: they remind me of the symbolist paintings of the late nineteenth century, with their floral motifs and their evocations of death and rebirth.
In other compositions the spots are dancing, evoke abstract rhythms, and the viewer can not stop feeling concrete evocations: lights, aquatic reflections, waterfalls, but also stamped fabrics worn by time, wall fragments. A single red monochromatic fabric seems to enunciate a new stage, a leap to greater difficulty. It is a dense and dramatic fabric, and therefore, we will still have to see more surprises in the work of this born painter.
by Victoria Combalía
Ricardo Nomdedeu and Perico Pastor. After the closing of the Pérgamon gallery, its gallery owners have maintained a consulting activity and temporary exhibitions with restricted hours or prior appointment. In their new space Principal Obert propose an interesting dialogue between two painters and two pictorial modes. On the one hand, a selection of Perico Pastor paintings where the fluid line and the black and white tones predominate. And on the other hand, a selection of paintings by Ricardo Nomdedeu characterized by a fluid and sensual chromatic richness, which is situated in an intermediate zone between the purely pictorial expressionist abstraction and the evocation of forms and substances characteristic of the natural world: a kind of fluid world and floating, aerial or perhaps aquatic, vegetable and at the same time almost carnal.
Juan Bufill. “La Vanguardia”, May 14, 2018
Vanessa Graell. “El Mundo”, March 26, 2015A “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 Nomdedeu is the discovery of N2 Gallery, which introduces today the painter’s first show: “Metamorphosis”. “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 (the only mention of Nomdedeu on Google is in connection with his law firm). And the bet is paying off. Days before the show’s opening several paintings have already been sold.
“The concept of metamorphosis frames everything: the transformation of matter, the expression, the stroke, how everything evolves to create a painting”, Nomdedeu, who has been praised byveteranart critic Victoria Comabalia, says. “There is no one better than her to link you with the tradition of American action painting and European lyric abstraction: Pollock, Clyfford Still, Sam Francis Juan Mitchell, Wols, Hantal.” In her notes on the “Metamorphosis” exhibit, Comabalia defines Nomdedeu’s color palette in the following way: “The vibrant colors(Nomdedeu not only dares to work with obstreperousgreenbut employs it as his basic color) recall exotic flowers, with intense reds and yellows scattered across the canvas. Blues and violets provide a counterpoint, suggesting depth.”
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 rules”, 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.
Recently two exhibitions opened that in some ways could be said to be complementary, as each clearly embodies qualities specific to two separate disciplines: the fluidity of painting and the precision of sculpture.
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 Nomdedeu’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 artists 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 ambiguous 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.
THE LANGUAGES OF ART by Juan Bufill “La Vanguardia”, April 6, 2015
The metamorphosis of Ricardo Nomdedeu
by Victoria CombalíaBetween 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.
If the society was changing and gave the feeling of mobility (with their leisure in the suburbs, carriages and trains) the landscape depicted also changed. The tones were no longer the brownish of academic painting, but real green, blue and pink from the sky, poppy red, yellow wheat.
With the Nymphéas of Monet the dissolution of shapes as spots of light and colourreaches its apotheosis. He painted them very late in his career, when in other parts had appeared 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 Metamorphosis. 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.