Le Bain Turc (after Ingres)

In «Le Bain Turc (after Ingres) » there are signs pointing to a manifest eruption of the body, sexuality, and eroticism - important axes in Pomar’s work. This is one of several works in which Júlio Pomar explicitly adopts, in the title, the name of the work and the artist that serve as his reference.

Pomar revisits an important episode in the History of Art - of painting and through painting - demonstrating that the flat colour filling the forms provides them with a precise contour, which is sufficient to give structure to the composition. Colour itself thus comes to function as form; it differentiates itself from adjacent colours or from the background by providing a contour, and all these colour-forms together contribute to the structure and balance of the pictorial planes.

In this way, Pomar is essentially elaborating and testing, at the level of the sensorial dimension - that is, colour - syntheses concerning the construction of an image. On this matter, Júlio Pomar was explicit: «Ingres and Matisse, the two together, helped me in my work. Their influence was complementary and decisive.»