Bowing to the Light

If Eva Maria Pacheco Ricote’s paintings had a title, they would all have the same and it would be Silence. In front of one of her paintings, the effect is intense and almost immediate: contemplation, calm, appeasement.

It seems that the colors find an echo within us and speak to us of softness and light. The golden hues that Eva has been using for many years, a sacred color if any, link her painting with the sacred. In this recent series, characterised by the presence of a deep pink – Coral Pink -, the canvas, delicately whitewashed beforehand seem to expose the very respiration of the colors into one another. Balance and lightness of the line, strength and softness mingle, it is a lesson in harmony.

These canvases are all permeated with light. They convey in reality the quality of being in which Eva finds herself when she paints: an inner clarity reached by the meditation that precedes the work and guides the artist throughout the making of these canvases. Eva paints on several canvases at the same time and on the ground to experience her connection with the earth, in the humble position of the one who bows and pays tribute. Space, brushes, everything must be very clean, but even more, it is the inner space of the artist that must be transparent.

“As an incarnated human being, we are in motion, and the first movement is breath,” Eva Maria Pacheco Ricote explains. “The gesture accomplished on the canvas is the extension, the amplification of this first movement. The brush is only an instrument by which something greater than myself expresses itself. When I see my paintings finished, some time after, I say to myself: “I did this, can’t be me”. It’s not ‘me’ Eva that paints, but a bigger ‘me’.”

The canvas receives and impresses a movement, that of the breath, that of the body which meditation has opened and purified. In this, the gesture of Eva – which is not without a certain kinship with calligraphy -, imposes itself like a breathing. Her paintings are nothing static: they preserve the integrity of the inner journey accomplished by and through the artist and invites the spectator to contemplate and follow her in their turn.

These two works, the most recent, were made once back to India after a first trip to Africa where her sister lives, a visit that undoubtedly influenced these paintings. This journey is no stranger to the presence of pink, a color never seen before in Eva‘s painting. As the artist points out, “colors have their own vibration. Pink is connected to the energy of love, the golden to the divine. Thus, each work vibrates in a unique way and it is this frequency that the viewer can enter into harmony with”.

Eva’s painting talks to our feelings. Their abstraction can intrigue and the emotion it arouses seems illogical or inexplicable, difficult to express in words. It is because it touches a more intuitive part in us. Everyone feels the vibrations of the canvas and resonates with the painting according to their own inner state. “My goal in this life is to express the spiritual and connect it to souls by touching them”, says Eva.

Unconditionally, the objective is achieved.

Mix media on cotton canvas.
1- 36 x 24 cm.
2- 42 x 60 cm.

Exhibition and sales: Creativity Art Gallery, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi – http://creativityartgallery.com