In Passing Through, the small figure at the brilliant opening is less physically assertive than the shadow it casts towards us. That reversal establishes the painting’s central argument: a passing presence can occupy a space more forcefully through its projection than through the body itself. The viewer meets the trace before reaching the person.
The square canvas concentrates the scene around a sharply angled passage. Blue-violet walls lean towards the white opening, while warm, repeated strokes on the floor give the shadow a measured route into the foreground. The furniture-like form at the right supplies a recognisable interior detail without stabilising the whole room. Colour works structurally: cool enclosure presses against a nearly colourless source of light, and orange-purple transitions keep their boundary active. The acrylic strokes remain legible as marks, particularly across the floor and vertical edges, so the room alternates between an inhabited illusion and an arrangement of paint.
The artist’s statement explicitly connects this 2016 painting to the brevity of life and an unknown state beyond it. A particular religious belief or personal loss is not documented. Its long shadow and disturbed perspective offer a precise comparison with de Chirico’s metaphysical spaces, where scale and projection make familiar architecture uneasy. Dulcídio’s more fluid handling changes that inheritance: space appears to dissolve under light rather than stand immovably around it. The catalogue’s reference to Abstract Expressionism is less persuasive as a primary classification, since the gestures continue to serve a legible narrative setting.
The image contributes to a continuing debate about how representational painting can address mortality without merely illustrating an idea. Its limit is the recognisability of the luminous threshold as an existential shorthand. The disproportionate shadow gives it a more specific proposition, however: absence is prepared within presence, before any departure occurs. The work is strongest where this spatial anomaly complicates the title and lets painted geometry sustain an uncertainty that words would resolve too quickly.