oil on canvas / 180 x 180 cm

2026

Richard Somonte

La stessa serenità belongs to a series that Richard Somonte began working on in 2021 and revisited in early 2026. In this body of work, the artist explores a dialogue between the tradition of Western painting and the visual language of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

The work draws upon the principles of color divisionism, a subject theorized by one of Somonte’s foremost artistic references, Eugène Delacroix, and which would later contribute to the development of approaches such as Pointillism. Richard brings these principles into a contemporary context by connecting them with the idea of electromagnetic flows and the behavior of particles in the presence of a magnetic field, introducing a scientific and dynamic dimension to the composition.

At the center of the image, a samurai inspired by the ukiyo-e tradition appears on a horse rendered with a strong sense of realism. The coexistence of these seemingly distant visual languages lies at the heart of the work: Western painting and Japanese printmaking meet, confront one another, and ultimately merge within a single image.

The composition also makes a direct reference to the work of Toyohara Chikanobu, one of the great masters of Japanese woodblock printing in the late nineteenth century. Rather than reproducing the original print, Somonte reinterprets its imagery through the sensibility of contemporary painting, creating a space where tradition, science, movement, and painting enter into dialogue.

La stessa serenità thus presents an image suspended between two worlds: the stillness of the samurai and the invisible movement of the forces that pass through matter.