"The transgression is not the negation of the forbidden, but it over[1]comes it and completes it" Georges Bataille, The eroticism

The exhibition by Cuban artist Angel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos (Holguín, Cuba, 1965) makes the mandate given to Orpheus elusive: on his return from hell he did not have to look back if he wanted to bring Eu[1]rydice back to life. He looked back and Eurydice sank back into the realm of darkness. Orpheus´ garden is the evocation of the privilege of his own gaze, which attracted by the desire of provocation; with his action he unleashed chaos, violence and destruction in Eurydice. That little doubt completely destroyed the will to emerge victorious.

The flowers of Ricardo Ríos are a swing that crosses the past and the present like a tribulation itself that the risks of the imagination provoke in the artist, the flowers develop in doubts that dance between fleetingness. Time as a deconstructor of reason through an aesthetic charged with eroticism, vulnerability and transgression.

The idea of a flower that is going to wither and the ability of Ricardo Ríos to capture that idea of beauty without frugality, represents the moment before chaos. And it is that, seen as a whole, the development of each of the works of Orpheus Garden, evokes an emotion in the face of aesthetic voluptuousness.

It seems that, in each brushstroke, there is a linear or chronological advance that the total integration of Ricardo's landscapes refers us to a single landscape, this is how the artist draws a puzzle from time and space to extend in the flowers, the perpetuity and resurrection of what seems impossible: stopping the present in moments.

It is time looking at us, it is also the erotic and even violent meaning of flowers. Overflow, excess, deviation and disintegration through his work. They are forbidden pleasures that Angel Ricardo has managed to recognize in the abyss of creation, a time that opens from top to bottom, in a spiral and in capital letters, and that takes us to a privileged moment in the poetic realism of the Cuban artist.

For Ricardo, art has been, par excellence, an instrument of exploration and knowledge, a way of achieving, through this exhibition, an X-ray of his own surrounding reality, an efficient method through which the artist has been able to get to know himself and from that starting point to darkly know the world around him, Ricardo's work is a link to inhabit uninhabited territories. It is the relationship between the artist himself and his reality.

And it is that Ricardo's relationship with history has the sense of a gradual awareness of his own freedom: his work is a search, a proverb that he has known how to glimpse, to give us with light and color the perpetual birth of beauty, through the past and the future, they are those flowers that once we see them, inhabit us in the form of our own time that accommodates itself right there, to the leap that we do not dare to take.

Welcome to the excess of freedom that Ricardo's work stops in time.

Saul Reyna.

Venue: Galería Secreta