Dan Ramirez in Gallifa/ Victor M. Cassidy

Gallifa Drawing
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

Dan Ramirez in Gallifa

ArtNet.com
1/22/03

Victor M. Cassidy



Dan Ramirez, one of Chicago's premier mid-career artists, has created a visual language of great beauty and clarity. In his acrylic paintings, we see formal, geometric arrangements of vertical lines and blocks in pure color. The surface is flat and there's little suggestion of depth, but the color often fades slowly from one end of a block to the other.

Ramirez claims to be inspired by philosophy or music, but it's not always easy to connect his imagery to its sources. "TL-P," a body of paintings from the 1970s, responds to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ramirez made etchings in the '80s that he related to the music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen.

In summer of 2002, Ramirez was an artist in residence at the Fundacio Tallers Joesp Llorens Artigas in Gallifa, a town near Barcelona in Spain. He worked there with Joan Gardy Artigas, a Spanish artist who is best-known for his 20-year ceramic collaboration with Joan Miró. Inspired by this new environment, Ramirez produced three suites of acrylic paintings on paper, which he showed at Printworks in December.

This is the first time within memory that Ramirez has put a brush to paper. The new work, which employs his familiar imagery is now enriched with brush strokes. While these works still have literary sources, they are more relaxed and approachable than his paintings -- and easier to read.

The "Gallifa" suite, for example, responds to the spectacular mountainous terrain in the town where the artist worked with imagery that suggests water and sky glimpsed through an open window. The "Veronica" suite, all rich reds and blacks, results from Ramirez' attendance at bullfights. A Veronica is a maneuver in which the torero diverts the bull's charge with his red cape.

The "Majestat Batalló" suite responds to a 12th-century Romanesque crucifix (unusual because it shows a clothed Christ) that the artist saw in the nearby Museu Nacional D'Art de Catalonia. Ramirez will return to the Gallifa workshop this summer for his first experience of ceramics. We await the results with enthusiasm.

Dan Ramirez in Gallifa/ Victor M. Cassidy

Gallifa view from Studiio
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

Dan Ramirez in Gallifa

ArtNet.com
1/22/03

Victor M. Cassidy



Dan Ramirez, one of Chicago's premier mid-career artists, has created a visual language of great beauty and clarity. In his acrylic paintings, we see formal, geometric arrangements of vertical lines and blocks in pure color. The surface is flat and there's little suggestion of depth, but the color often fades slowly from one end of a block to the other.

Ramirez claims to be inspired by philosophy or music, but it's not always easy to connect his imagery to its sources. "TL-P," a body of paintings from the 1970s, responds to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ramirez made etchings in the '80s that he related to the music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen.

In summer of 2002, Ramirez was an artist in residence at the Fundacio Tallers Joesp Llorens Artigas in Gallifa, a town near Barcelona in Spain. He worked there with Joan Gardy Artigas, a Spanish artist who is best-known for his 20-year ceramic collaboration with Joan Miró. Inspired by this new environment, Ramirez produced three suites of acrylic paintings on paper, which he showed at Printworks in December.

This is the first time within memory that Ramirez has put a brush to paper. The new work, which employs his familiar imagery is now enriched with brush strokes. While these works still have literary sources, they are more relaxed and approachable than his paintings -- and easier to read.

The "Gallifa" suite, for example, responds to the spectacular mountainous terrain in the town where the artist worked with imagery that suggests water and sky glimpsed through an open window. The "Veronica" suite, all rich reds and blacks, results from Ramirez' attendance at bullfights. A Veronica is a maneuver in which the torero diverts the bull's charge with his red cape.

The "Majestat Batalló" suite responds to a 12th-century Romanesque crucifix (unusual because it shows a clothed Christ) that the artist saw in the nearby Museu Nacional D'Art de Catalonia. Ramirez will return to the Gallifa workshop this summer for his first experience of ceramics. We await the results with enthusiasm.

BELISARIUS: REFLECTIONS/John Brunetti

The Hearing #IV
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

Dan Ramirez

BELISARIUS: REFLECTIONS
NEW PAINTINGS

KLEIN ART WORKS
CHICAGO, ILLINOS

JANUARY 8 – FEBRUARY 19, 2000

John Brunetti, Art Critic


Nothing is certain when your about.” Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

This dialogue from the Irish playwright’s spare, modernist work epitomizes Dan Ramirez’s oeuvre. More importantly, the play’s exploration of the cycle of death, redemption and re-birth can be seen as a metaphor for this significant artist’s return to his hometown after a ten year absence, and his accompanying artistic rejuvenation. Indeed Beckett’s own descriptions of his play, “a matter of fundamental sounds…striving all the time to avoid definition,’ uncannily suggest Ramirez’s minimalist, music-inspired compositions of the 70’s and 80’s, as well as the resurrection of their signature vocabulary in his current paintings. Though familiar, his formal elements—monolithic, shimmering vertical bands, evanescent gradations of tone, razor-thin tapering bars—resist easy categorization. They neither reveal absolute truths, nor deconstruct systems of logic. Instead, they are always intuitive and emotional expressions of the artist’s deepest personal responses to his life. However, it is Ramirez’s unspoken, albeit unlikely, kinship with another modern master of stillness and shifting perceptions, the painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti , that allows insight into his veiled language. For both artists, sight is paramount and always suspect. The elusiveness of an edge between a shape and its surrounding space reveals the fiction behind complete comprehension of our environment, and our relationship to it. The internal conflicts that arise from the resulting reverberations make palpable the renewal of Ramirez’s distinctive voice.

Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus: An Homage to Olivier Messiaen

Contemplation of Silence c
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

Catalogue essay: the Art Institute of Chicago, January 22 to March 15, 1981

Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus: An Homage to Olivier Messiean


I chose the French composer Olivier Messiaen’s piano composition, “Vingt regards sur l’Enfant Jesus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus), as the theme for these prints so that I may pay homage to a man and to an art form that has been a great source of inspiration to me.

In “Vint regards,” Messiaen took up the same ideas of Dom Columbia Marmion (Le Christ dans ses mysteres) and Maurice Toesca (Les Douze regards) wherein they spoke of the contemplations of the shepards, of the angels, of the Virgin and of the Celestial Father. “Vint regards,” according to Messiaen, is an adaptation of these four themes while at the same time an addition of sixteen new contemplations. In speaking about the contemplations, Messaien has said that “…More than in all my preceding works, I have looked here for a language of mystical love, to be varied, powerful and tender, sometimes brutal, responding to multicolored commands.” I too, in these twenty intaglio prints, have tried to formulate such a language – a language befitting the sublime nature of the subject.

The first phase of this work began with a series of pencil drawings and then was extended into the medium of printing. It was in the process of creating theses images that an appreciation of the various intaglio techniques (etching, drypoint, electrically vibrated drypoint mezzo-tint, engraving, and aquatint) became a dominant factor in the series. This was especially true when I realized that if I ignored certain relationships inherent within the medium, the language I sought would be severely limited. Some of the formal elements, such as line, space, and texture, that were peculiar to intaglio, revealed new possibilities when combined with blind embossing (a depressed element printed without ink). Accepting this interchangeability as a challenge and an opportunity to explore, I found that my visual interpretations often changed dramatically from the earlier drawings. It was during this change and while attempting to synthesize idea and emotion with the process that I experienced the fine line which connects form and expression, when personal meaning and the medium function as one. It was a moment in which I was fully able to appreciate and experience a sense of the self, the medium and the unexpected.

I hope that with these twenty contemplations I have given to Olivier Messiaen the respect and the admiration that he so richly deserves, and that I have remained respectful of the medium of music which he loves. Perhaps Messiaen would agree that when J.S. Bach one of the canons in his “Musical Offering,” “Quaerendo invenietis” (By seeking, you will discover) that Bach should have added “the unexpected” as well!

Daniel P. Ramirez
September 25, 1980
Chicago, Illinois


Note* A suite of twenty intaglio prints, in an edition of ten, plus five artist’s proofs. The prints were pulled by the artist and Dennis McWilliams at the Chicago Center for the Print, between August and December 1980. The image size of each is noted in the catalogue; they were printed on Arches paper of approximately 565 x 760 mm. The prints in the exhibition are marked A.I.C.Proof and are the gift of Mr. And Mrs. Herman Ramirez.

The study drawings in graphite, on Strathmore paper of approximately 587 x 738 mm., are the gift of the family of Mrs. Dorothy Gomez-Schultz in her memory.

The trial proofs, on Rives or Arches paper, are also the gift of the family of Mrs. Gomez-Schultz.