Ricardo Frutuoso

The Eternals beheld his vast Forests is a line of verse taken from William Blake's First Book of Urizen (1794). Through reference to the Book of Genesis, and in this specific case to the Garden of Delights, Blake explores the theme of oppression and the need for individual and social liberation. Blake defended the idea that the fall of any man has consequences for all society, the most important being a return to a state of savagery that infects paradise with shame and the loss of innocence.
The human figures painted by Frutuoso represent these Eternals. Eternally fragile, eternally unprotected that - after the fall -return to a primitive state. In this world of savagery, the human being is no longer a superior race, but appears in a wild, untameable version where his private acts are exposed to everyone's gaze, equivalent to a monkey, who marks out his territory with urine. In the new 'paradise', promiscuity and apathy reign. The essence of the communion between man and nature that was upheld and proposed by the romantics is re-announced herein, but in a stage of post-innocence, post-enlightenment and post-modernism. Civilisation after infidelity and destruction, after the end of civilisation itself.