Navio Negreiro [The Slave Ship]

Situated in the final phase of Pomar’s production - sometimes referred to as his late period - «Navio Negreiro» [Slave Ship] is a complex work. A composite diptych, its material presence evokes the history of Western painting and, more specifically, the universe of religious painting.

Begun in 2005, on the occasion of an illustrated edition of «Dom Quixote de la Mancha» [Don Quixote of La Mancha], the work is less about an explicit reference to Cervantes than about the significance of the gesture through which the artist, from the outset, inscribes the captive figure as a black man. In this gesture - which clearly goes beyond an impartial or illustrative approach to a literary work - lies the potential of the piece. Precisely through the lucidity with which, at a time of increasing radicalisation in debates about Europe’s heavy colonial legacy, Pomar brought to the centre of his painting a decisive question that intimately touches the Portuguese imagination.

Far removed from the caravel or the ship as symbols of the «Discoveries», «Navio Negreiro» [Slave Ship] is, for an observer without preconceptions, a work that speaks of slavery - an image of explicit violence that actively signals the role of memory, replacing, in a curious analogy, the place of the writer with that of the painter, who appears in the lower right corner.