Gerardo Zavarce.

Curator

Chromatic Palimpsests

Appropriating the imprint of the pictorial as a sign of a short story defines the core of the sensitive exploration undertaken by Ana Margarita Ramírez (Caracas, Venezuela, 1974). Under this process the residual character of the painting allows it to construct a warp that restores; that is to say, it reconstructs, space and time from its margins, from the small indexical sign that propitiates the pictorial substance when crossing its own limits, when scattered, moved by chance and gravity, these chromatic forms being inscribed as vestiges that must be reconstructed by the look, extended memory as a poetic plot, which gives meaning to the perceptual experience.

Ramírez’s work revolves around the development of a creation practice that makes the workshop space a place for emotional connection on the basis of conceiving the creative situation as an integral restoration exercise, not only through the plastic elements. that constitute their aesthetic experience, but also of their integral and properly vital condition. For her art is conceived as a territory where emotions come together, thus fosters an intense regeneration exercise of the art and life alliance.

In this sense, color and line become essential features of a series of properly ritual acts that serve as a prelude to generate a method of composition that orders and generates a plane of juxtaposed chromatic densities. Weaving is creating, interweaving, there is a deep link between the action of creating and the act of generating a fabric, a network of multiple contacts, a field of libidinal frictions, a collision of symbolic senses and experiences conceived as chromatic palimpsest.

Under these premises each torn piece of pictorial residue is strengthened by interweaving, so what is woven is joined, tied, acquired resistance, becomes a structure that gives meaning and enhance the emergence of forms.

The fabric is a bridge to the other shore, supports and allows movement. Knitting with the line and the color allows to generate a transit path to another place, it is movement. In this way, the records and compositions made by Ana Margarita Ramírez accept being interpreted as paintings where the expression of vitality is expressed through structure, chance and movement.

She builds a story through the testimony of color that overflows as a sign and that is inscribed as a particular imprint of various forms of connection: an emotional trace of the sensitive moment, a trace of a particular flow of energy, of a circular movement that becomes the order to disorder and from disorder to order.

In each of her proposals the transparency of her pictorial story is surprising. Each proposal makes explicit the surprise, the chance, the enjoyment of the plastic fact. When referring to pictorial matter, Ramírez describes them as skins, as bodies impregnated with vitality. For her, each fragment is the result of a breach, they are bodies that are loaded with meanings and whose skin unfolds as the setting for a new text, articulated by a language that lacks letters, words, but that is shown as a sign of almost purity, as a display of an experience that makes creation and artistic practice the path to be traveled.

This transparency in her speech we can also perceive in the need to show the proper atmosphere of the workshop. The space of creation as a laboratory of experiences, as a setting for the articulation of creative discourse. The materials of the workshop, the overflows of the workshop, the waste from the workshop, the context of creation are shown as vestiges of the complex adventure that the practice of the artist supposes as experience.

In this way, the creation workshop imposes a method that consolidates the density of artistic discourse, it is also a space for learning, for the configuration of a climate that induces the adventures and circumstances that allow creation. In the case of Ana Margarita Ramírez, the experience offered by the workshop

is fundamental and she incorporates it into her proposal as a matter of aesthetic elaboration.

There is, then, an exercise in self-reflection of the practice of artistic creation itself. She discovers and reveals the creative act as evidence; she reveals her vestiges, her remains; shows its residual and marginal nature, she moves around the edges of artistic practices experimenting on the ideas and experiences that remain in the small story of the masking of the fabric, of the paint that splashes on the floor, of the pigment residues that they run along the outer edge of the cans. We insist, her paintings are chromatic palimpsestos whose graphics interweave a history of the small, of the other, of the wounds that heal, of the memory that overcomes oblivion, of the fragile discarded whose pictorial imprint recovers as a gesture to make it protagonist of a new sensitive story. There the sublime of her work, to make of the tearing, of the marginal, of the small, of the fragile, a poetic act inscribed as a pictorial trace that becomes in new forms, textures and harmonies.

Ana Margarita Ramírez (Caracas, Venezuela, 1974) started her studies at the Cristóbal Rojas School of Visual Arts in 1992. She studied jewelry and sculpture at the Cándido Millán School and the Armando Reverón School. In 2002 she attended the workshops of Petra Kowalsky, Margaret Salazar and Corina Briceño. Among her individual exhibitions are the Registro (2017) Galería G7, Caracas, Venezuela. Blooming Propositions of Ana Margarita Ramírez, Altamira Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia. Poetic energy (2010) Geneva, Switzerland. Regarding her work, curator Alberto Asprino points out: “(…) Her recent work seeks to interlace painting and drawing as a timely alliance, fusing in a collage way everything that moves her emotionally, a sort of existential self-portrait that identifies and mobilizes her at a creative level. ” She currently resides and works in Caracas, Venezuela

Alberto Asprino.

In the context of emerging Venezuelan art, painting has been shaping new interpretations and relevant statements, both on an aesthetic and conceptual plane, allowing for an approach to those changes which, in the creative arts, vindicate its timeliness and significance as a contemporary discourse again.

Ana Margarita Ramírez assumes this challenge with a rigorous dedication, surrender and commitment. Her recent work seeks to interlace painting and drawing as an opportune alliance, fusing, in the manner of collage, all that which emotionally moves it in a kind of existential self-portrait which identifies her and is responsible for her creative thrust.

Her pieces are built up on the basis of pictorial brush strokes which, without decreeing a specific order, turn into fragments and lines which shape the spaces and refuges of an expressive gesture which is also intense and impassioned.

It is not precisely chance which defines her work, but that careful and sensitive filigree which reveals the skill and disposition which has characterized it from the start, based on the innate discipline and patience of the artist.

As records of her own personal history, her works take the form of clippings/skins which are superposed on each other over and over again until they create a material body which fuses itself into a whole, with a stress on multiple accepts, which, like a silent sculpture, then turn into seams and creases.

As a process and quest, her oeuvre reinvents and recycles memories of her day to day life, the driving force which leads her to question and mobilize her art so that she can continue to inquire, explore and encounter her own identity and existence from this world.