Hildebrando de Castro

The Heart Inside Out

“With Me / Anatomy is all wrong. / I’m all heart.” Mayakovsky

Symbol of passion, sign of sentiment. The heart pops up in our memory as emotion’s most perfect metaphor. By bringing his pastel hearts to Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Hildebrando de Castro lets show the challenging and paradoxical content in them: by questioning passion, the artist transfers to the viewer the various “readings” conveyed by these more-than-perfect pastels. Hearts that signal reasoning behind explicit emotivity.

Pastel drawing-chalk, pencil, oil – is a technique that allows the fixation of the drawing onto paper. Keeping in contact over time. As with painting. They are actually paintings these pastels by Hildebrando. That is, the highly skilled technique leads viewers to see them as paintings. So, “pastel painting” is the best way to classify his works. The artist has a unique manner of using this technique. A special way of pressing the pastel stick onto the surface – what accounts for uniformity both in tone and intensity – giving these works a “painting look”. Painting is also everything that looks like painting.

“The style is the man”, old Buffon has said. And Hildebrando’s style, his very particular way of grasping the world’s reality, still maintains all the vigor and vim on the six pastels specially prepared for this show. Now, he no more covers up the whole surface as before, where he filled out the picture with his dense and dark chromaticism. These bruised hearts, preserved in wine, detached from the background, breathing and throbbing on the whiteness of the paper.

Possessing a highly refined technique, an absolute master of the figure within expressionism, Hildebrando de Castro spent most of his life poring over his drawings, reflections of childhood’s color pencils – The last 17 years were totally dedicated to the pastel medium. Besides formal refinement, one of the distinctive traits of this 37 years old of Pernambuco which stands out, is the rebelliousness imprinted in his career – from the critical viewing of consumer society pervading his pre – 1986 works to the hieratic postures in his figures from then on, where the lighting and the layout of his compositions evoke religious art turned inside out.

A meditation on passion is exactly what one can glean from the works shown, where Hildebrando resumes the recurrent (Eucharistic?) heart of other periods to appoint it as the sole leading character in this emotion – governed series. A wholly self-committed metaphor, those hearts – almost icons . They are hearts all right, yes they are – with the full force of their signs: a mixture of rapture and of a turning back to oneself. In other words, it is nothing else than the most perfect form of turning oneself to the other, in the sense of intertwining of reconnecting – religion in its essence.

Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil.

Translation by: Paulo Andrade Lemos.