Tigre [Tiger]

«Tigre [Tiger]» is a work that condenses some of the most significant proposals and working questions developed by Júlio Pomar. The work, as well as the entire series centred on this feline, emerged from the illustrations the artist produced for the book «Rose et bleu» by Jorge Luis Borges, published by Éditions de la Différence in 1978.

In Júlio Pomar’s own words, this tiger - the central figure of the story - has the particularity of not existing. The animal is only identified and named through accounts by people who have seen the traces and footprints of its passage. The enigmatic presence of this tiger in the story becomes so mysterious that it gives rise to a cycle of works in which the animal occupies the central position, as it does in the narrative, serving as a means to explore questions about painting such as gesture, movement, texture, colour, and eroticism.

A feline with agile movement and a seductive, mottled coat, the affinity between the sensorial qualities of painting and those of the animal would already be enough to explain Pomar’s interest in the figure of the tiger. Added to this is the fact that the tiger symbolically embodies the elusive nature of the image - that is, the difficulty or even the impossibility of fixing it.