In Days of Rage, anger acquires a boundary. A dense, approximately rectangular accumulation occupies the centre of a red field, whose uneven outer edge leaves a pale margin visible. The central formation appears agitated, yet it is held in place. The painting derives its tension from this discrepancy: a surface that suggests eruption is also a surface that contains it.
Red operates both as surrounding field and as an interruption within the darker mass. It enters through openings between brown, olive, black and pale strokes, preventing the centre from becoming an opaque block. The eye repeatedly moves between the whole and its small cavities. Light is dispersed across narrow white accents and apparently raised passages; it does not describe a coherent external source. The photograph suggests an emphatic relief, although its depth and the presence of anything beyond the documented oil paint cannot be established from reproduction. The wooden support provides a rigid ground for this insistence on the surface.
The work can be situated beside the material concerns of European postwar abstraction, particularly the use of a damaged or resistant surface as a bearer of meaning. Burri offers a useful comparison because colour, fissure and physical support become inseparable in his work. The distinction matters: there is no evidence here of Burri’s use of torn sacks or burnt plastic. Dulcídio’s image establishes its own pressure through an entangled painted density and a red surround. Likewise, its central enclosure resists the dispersal associated with all-over gestural painting. Its activity remains concentrated rather than extended evenly to every edge.
The title authorises an emotional and potentially political reading, but it does not identify a particular uprising, war or private event. No date or explanatory statement accompanies the local documentation. Rage might therefore be understood as an accumulation that has become difficult to articulate: a plausible reading of the image, not an account of the artist’s biography. Within Dulcídio’s practice, the work gives the material surface a role that a face or a narrative scene assumes elsewhere.
Its achievement lies in making agitation persist without resolving it into a recognisable incident. Its limitation follows from the same choice. Red and dark congestion can become familiar signs of violence, while the centre’s jewel-like flashes risk making turmoil decorative. The irregular red perimeter keeps that seduction unsettled: the painting appears both framed and incompletely contained. Its relevance to expressive abstraction rests on this unresolved relation between bodily excitement, visual pleasure and the difficulty of assigning either a stable meaning.