Title: Enrique Ramírez
Description: Addressing pain, absence and terror, and to do it poetically, is not simple for a visual artist. To revisit the past with good will or a fierce political commitment is not enough to build a body of work that will move people, and also pose questions to reactivate the past critically and poetically. Usually, slapping a sleeping consciousness with bursts of expressivity and wrath does not yield good results. When horror presents itself as a mirror, without any mediation, without any metaphors, the work will not garner the spectatorœs empathy and he or she, irremediably, will withdraw, hide or escape. Quite on the contrary, the work of Enrique Ramírez is a balm, suggestive, without renouncing the necessary dose of discomfort and perplexity that questions the common place, the certainties and, even, the prejudice about the artistic production that alludes the recent past. For this young Chilean artist the potency of beauty is not in conflict with seriousness and respect for the issues he addresses. Thus, Ramírez reconstructs metaphors about his countryœs political history, contemporary migrations and the forced exiles that the power of global capital forces upon people, pushing them outside their nations or inside themselves, changing their identities, pushing unthinkable exchanges and deeply altering the perception and day to day life of millions. His work evidences social issues and his work is a meeting point for political and existential interests, but always being thought from the image, questioning and exploring the power of images to transform reality. In a sense, Enrique seems obsessed with narrating Chileœs political history through the landscape, a landscape scarred by loss, by voyages and displacements, but also by personal lucubration, imagination and the erratic wondering of the mind. In his films, the presence of the sea is almost unavoidable, like a condensor of meaning and as main narrative axis of his stories: ±I feel that, for Chileans, the Pacific Ocean is the real memory site, he says . Between "I do not make films," declares Ramírez, "I only occupy discipline as one more form of expression among thousands of narrative, plastic, political and poetictechnical and material procedures. An absolutism that, inherited from the modern autonomy of the media, pretends that they define the distinctive particularity of each category of artistic work, encased in a list of compartments and careful to mark its peculiarity. Thus, each medium, cataloged as "cinema", "video", "photography", "engraving", "installation", "objectual art", etc., claims its sovereign jurisdictions as if the work was not the product of contingent operations that they involve the sense, but the foreseeable result of pure instrumental devices.
Subjects: Exhibitions, Criticism and interpretation, Video art, Installations (Art), Chilean Art, Themes, motives
Places: Chile
People: Enrique Ramírez (1979-)