“Alchemy of Painting” - Ricardo Carbajal Moss shows recent paintings at the Berner gallery Christine Brügger.

Poppies, 2009
Acryl auf Plexiglas
53 x 30 cm

Woman 10, 2010
Acryl auf Holz
30 x 20 cm

She Said Yes the First Time, 2010
Acryl auf Leinwand
100 x 60 cm

A gallery full of women’s faces in this show is ideal for speculation. The ladies in this part of the show cannot be placed in either a time nor in a geographical location. A few accessories like a hat, a veil, or a symbol such as a cherry or an acorn can lead one to imagine their preferences or their professions. These women are fictional characters a fantasy of the Symbolist Ricardo Carbajal Moss. They come from varied motifs and are painted as accurately as once did the old masters. In the Renaissance and in the Mannerist period there was an intellectual audience who enjoyed this kind of painting, one that discovered the hidden secret meanings in the hallucinations in works such as these. Tromp-l’oeil paintings were also much appreciated back then.

The artist started to paint in this manner while in Mexico. He then lived in California for a long time and now lives in the Eastern part of Switzerland. He presents his women as they really are. ‘’This is Rominia. She comes from Rome and lived 2000 years before Christ’’.  With a pencil.  Ricardo Carbajal Moss scribbles a few sentences on the back of each painting describing the subject’s life and personality. An oriental looking Yoko is in one of the paintings. There is a Maliza who is a mother of five warlocks. Some ladies are sitting showing a nude breast reminding us of the Madonna paintings of the Renaissance. Other ladies in Carbajal Moss’ paintings have slightly asymmetrical facial features and are sitting in half shade making them very frightening. ‘’This lady is not happy,’’ the artist  commented while talking about one of the women in his paintings. All of the paintings in this group of works have one thing in common. They are all painted on an off-black area that appears to have been  taped onto the background that is also black but is of a different intensity. This is a skilfully painted optical illusion and is a painting at its purest.

Strong Symbols
Strong symbols such as cherries or cherry branches often turn op in the paintings. When Ricardo Carbajal Moss arrived as a young hippy reading Herman Hesse in Wisconsin for a summer scholarship, he was twenty-one years old. The cherry farmers in Wisconsin let the cherries stay on the trees because there was an over abundance that year and  it was not profitable to pick them. ‘’I ate cherries morning, noon and night’’ says Carbajal Moss  laughing. In his art, Ricardo uses the cherry as a symbol of passion, lust, and also as a symbol of the transience of life. He also  paints ’’De Natura’’.  In these paintings he is very accurate and uses real models from nature for his subject matter.

Floating Objects
The poppies, floating objects, and birds’ nests are painted hyper-realistically. The artist stresses not to be a photo-realist since he often takes small liberties with shapes and colours of the objects he paints. The influence of Salvador Dali and René Magritte is clear in these dream sequences. In his most recent  paintings that he presents at Galerie Christine Brügger, together with Onur and Thomas Blank, Ricardo Carbajal Moss does away with cast shadows from the objects he paints. This gives his objects complete freedom and a great sense of suspension. The artist achieves the illusion of complete weightlessness in his sculptures. These consist of several painted movable glass panels depicting pillows, cherries, cups, or poppy pods.

Helen Lagger from the Berner Zeitung, calls Ricardo Carbajal Moss' show ‘’Alchemy of Painting’’. The show will run the month March until  the third of April.

This article by Helen Lagger originally appeared in German in the:

Berner Zeitung AG
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3001 Bern
Tel.: 031 330 31 11
Fax: 031 330 35 75 

12.03.2010
Helen Lagger / BernerZeitung BZ

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