[Study on a Red Background]

Pomar’s interest in equestrian spectacles and competitions dates back to the Sunday bullfights at Campo Pequeno in Lisbon in the late 1950s and continued into the early 1960s, after he settled in Paris in a neighbourhood where the Auteuil and Longchamp racecourses were located.

In «Study on a Red Background [Races]», from 1964, within a pinkish monochromatic atmosphere there erupts a latitudinal whirlwind of dark red smudges, almost black - «a movement of a single trajectory» (JP) - intensified by an orange flare and, above, by the complementarity of a light blue. The contrast between the dragged, dark marks and the chromatic nebulosity of the background reinforces the importance of temporality in the execution of the stains as meaning. These paintings, marked by frank gesturalism, signal a turning point in Júlio Pomar’s work. Although the subject matter does not depart from the social everyday and the painter’s lived experience - «the subject is not the content», Pomar stated - in these paintings it is painting itself that becomes their content. Pomar invests in the visual power of form in motion, that is, in the way the stain of colour, through the manner in which it is applied, becomes a signifier of force and speed.

If, on the one hand, the group of works produced between 1964 and 1965 was a commercial success, on the other it constitutes a body of work that soon came to a close due to the vortex that developed in his production - perhaps because of a feeling that it was tending toward picturesque explosions of colour, toward a temperamental painting detached from the experience of the world, something the artist never relinquished.