
By John Evens
AS THE Second World War approached and then in the reconstruction following, there was, among artists, a significant focus on Christ’s crucifixion as a means of depicting the horror of war and genocide. Francis Bacon, Romare Bearden, Rico Lebrun, Abraham Rattner, Lancelot Ribeiro, F. N. Souza, and Graham Sutherland were among those doing so because, as Lebrun stated, their images told a story of humanity’s inhumanity.
“Heads — In and Out of Time” at Ben Uri Gallery and Museum begins with examples of Ribeiro’s religious work including two “Crucifixions”. Ribeiro (1933-2010) was born into a Catholic Goan family in India, and his early work was inspired by Indian and Goan architecture and the Christian tradition in which he was raised, as well as the work of his older half-brother Souza.
Their complex relationships with their Catholic upbringings when combined with Expressionism resulted in tortured images of the crucifixion into which were fed the horrors of global warfare, experiences of racism in the UK, and the tensions that they felt in India.
Ribeiro’s Untitled (Crucifixion) (1963), with its Black Christ figure, and his stark image of a robed Christ displaying the stigmata — Untitled (Christ with Stigmata) (1961) — recall the wooden icons and religious adornments that he saw in the churches among the hillsides of Goa, where his family had their ancestral home, but as images exuding the pain of the torture being depicted.
In contrast, when he is using the motif of the Madonna, a lighter and brighter palette features, as in the pinks, reds, and oranges of his Mother and Child (Series III) (1965), which uses thick black lines and semi-transparent colours reminiscent of stained glass as it conveys the strong maternal bond between the faceless figures. The bold blue background of Rising from the Banks of Main (1992), which contains traces of the sky and an urban landscape, also has the head of the woman resembling a Madonna, with her facial features merely sketched in.
Ribeiro’s development towards greater abstraction and a series of faceless faces also has a spiritual underpinning, one based on Tantra. He described this yogic system as “an evolving system, the study of which has led the conscious mind through stages to a point of total acquiescence and negation of the self” leading, in his work, to the full achievement of “a kind of faceless, self-effacing form”.