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.

THE DANCER AND THE DANCE: PHILOSOPHY AND ACCOMPLISHMENT IN THE WORK OF DANIEL RAMIREZ

TL-P 6.421, 1976-77 :Museum of Conemporary Art:Chicago
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

ARTS MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 1982

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children”
________________________________________________________________________

THE DANCER
AND THE DANCE:
PHILOSOPHY AND
ACCOMPLISHMENT IN THE
WORK OF DANIEL RAMIREZ

Robert Glauber

Daniel Ramirez sees his art – all art – as a reflection of the grand order that underlies everything. He is much interested in making viewers think as in making them feel; in making them react as much as act. So he strives endlessly “to illustrate thinking” and seeks, by his art, to organize our vision.


Intellectual history has periodically been enriched by theorist-creators who have regarded their art as primarily an extension of their thought. They have understood painting-or novel writing or music or poetry-as an articulation of their abstract ideas into visual-or aural or written-form. They have seen all their creative work as an effort to set down in formal terms concepts that are essentially intellectual. In extreme cases, they considered their lives, their ideas, and their works as an indissoluble entity. In a way they could never explain, they all sought to make their ideas and the realization of them one and the same; to make perception and reaction simultaneous.

Richard Wagner was one such theorist-creator; Wassily Kandinsky was another. So were Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Arnold Achoenberg, Barnett Newman, and most of the early Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists. All saw complex philosophical purpose in their art. All sought an ancient goal; a unity of art and life; a bold and original, all encompassing “conclusion” about what Art is. I wonder how many of them ever read Flaubert’s bitter observation: “Ineptitude consists in wanting to reach conclusions…What mind worthy of the name, beginning with Homer, ever reached a conclusion?”

Fortunately for such theorists-creators, when they are really first rate, the search is all. The unending search is the driving force. Most abandoned their systems, precepts, and philosophy when hot creativity took over. Their drive to do new work in response to new stimuli, to express themselves as individuals, overrode their philosophic inclinations and systemic limitations. Possessed, they did what their creative forces dictated, not what their intellects tried to impose. Order gave way to inspiration.

All of these people (and others you can name) tried to transubstantiate thought into art. Is that possible? They tried to make their theories usurp their creative work. Is that possible? It is interesting to note that it is their work, almost without exception, we now prize. Their theories we ignore, regard as historically “interesting,” or, at best, tolerate.

Daniel Ramirez is an artist-theoretician who, by his own ready admission, falls comfortably into this group. It is not surprising that in 1978 when Ramirez was awarded a fellowship to complete his PH.D at the University of Chicago, it was not in the Department of Art but rather with the Committee on the History of Culture in the Department of the Humanities.

When you know his work, when you hear him speak, you see at once the logic of this. Ramirez, is above all, a student of systems; philosophical, musical, and religious. At the University he was particularly interested in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein His M.F.A. thesis, Expression as Tautology: “The Selfish Act” (a Case for Metaphysical Man), was, as he wrote, an indirect approach to the concerns of work.” He studied Wittgenstein’s system of logical progressions but took as a kind of underlying motto Wittgenstein’s own admission of fallibility: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

To sum up very briefly the three main concerns in Ramirez’s thought and art: 1) He is fascinated by Wittgenstein’s theses of interpersonal communication; 2) he recognizes similarity between Wittgenstein’s systematic approach to logic and the twelve tone row-scale Twelve-Tone Music developed by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern: 3) he seeks to combine strictly logical thought (personified in Wittgenstein) with creative intuition (as in Schoenberg, et al.) and attempts to apply them toward a clearer understanding of Thomist Thomist Theology theology. All of this must be rendered, then, into visual terms as drawings, paintings, and prints. Ramirez has adapted Descartes to his own need: I think; therefore I paint. And he is more comfortable with this perception than any other artist I know.

If all this sounds excruciatingly incondite, unnecessarily complex and even a bit precious, Ramirez would readily admit that it probably is. He is a good teacher (at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus) but is aware that his ideas, like his paintings, are not for everybody. He wrote: “My own work exists only for personal reasons. It is necessary to what I am, and I hoe I’m able to discriminate when I am not doing something worth looking at.”

Despite his philosophical underpinnings, Ramirez’s work, like all good art, is primarily an effort to present what Wittgenstein termed “communicable ideas.” Like Wittgenstein, Ramirez is willing to “pass over in silence” what he cannot communicate. So his is an art of balanced tensions and releases. It stems from an interplay with the seeable and the intuitive, the knowable and the instinctive. His work is not based on natural forms ( as with the Abstract Expressionists) but on systems and patterns of pure thought. It is a precisely engineered bridge between the philosophic (and musical) systems that intrigue him and the physical phenomena he must use to express them.

Ramirez is one of those students of philosophy who believes that phenomena determine theory-not the other way round. So he uses his extraordinary craftsmanship to give visual form to his ideas. He uses a repertoire of images that is self-restricted and formal, sometimes to the point of iciness.

At first glance, Ramirez might appear to be just another geometric abstractionist. One can read his work as a limited number of geometric forms (triangles, rectangles, and the trapezoids that result from their combination) differentiated by subtle gradients of pale colors, grays, whites, and blacks. In such a reading, Ramirez’s content would consist of the relationship of the forms, their arrangement and discipline. As such, he would merely be another follower of Albers’ dry lead.

But geometry is only the point of departure. Ramirez is not interested in shapes as such. He is as much concerned with the way we see as with what we see. He is interested in those strange quirks in our vision that makes straight lines bend and circles seem elliptical. (As in sophistry, ideas can be given the appearance of truth without being true.) Ramirez has dug down to the roots of how we perceive what we see. Thus he is allied to the ancient Greek architects who, by inventing entasis, curved the steps of the Parthenon to make them appear flat and bowed the columns to give them a straight look.

You can never be sure when you look at a Ramirez canvas if things are what they seem to be. Flat-appearing canvases may actually be curved, and gentle curves may be an illusion of color, shading, and form. This constantly shifting ground is one of the most fascinating aspects of his work. He makes us see what he wants us to see, not necessarily what is there. He deliberately confuses us to mar the usually sharp distinction between reality and illusion, between poet and reader, between what Yeats terms “…the blossom and the bole…the dancer and the dance.”

Ramirez is very interested in music. He has played the double bass professionally and is particularly fond of the works of Bach, Schoenberg, Webern, and Messiaen. He is accustomed to an aural world of great and subtle complexity. It is not surprising, therefore, that he orchestrates his series of drawings, paintings, and most recently, intaglio prints in terms of formal counterpoint. He answers one line with another as in a canon, uses the concept of theme and variations, elaborates ideas through an increasingly complex polyphony.

This is more than a hyperbolic or poetic reading of his work. In many cases it is conscious and calculated parallelism on his part. It is not mere poetic license that has led to such titles as Verklarte Nacht (two paintings) and Bild fur S,W,B @ 12 ( 12 graphite drawings with the S,W,B, standing for Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg). These are all Ramirez’s constructions in visual terms of musical values-values, not content.

A recent suite of 20 etchings is another example of the weaving of music into his art. Entitled Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus: An Homage to Olivier Messiaen Messiaen , The prints and their prepatory drawings are a tribute to a musician Ramirez greatly admires, as mystic as much as composer. They are, in Ramirez’s mind, equivalent but personal expressions of Messiaen’s special sensibility to the life of Christ.

Like the music, the prints are 20 variations on simple forms. There are three main leitmotifs in the music woven through many of the sections. Ramirez is equally bound by three forms. Like the music, the prints are tightly composed. The tonal range is small, the dynamics rigorously controlled. An ff in the music is as striking as a large area of matte black in a print.

The reverential theme (as both composer and printmaker understand it) is always there. Yet there is never even a suggestion, much less a depiction, of the Infant, the Cross, God the Father, or any of the other obviously theistic elements that make up the titles of the prints and form the core of most religious art.

The prints are all done in warm, infinitely varied grays, often cut into incredibly sharp black lines. Bold forms are set down in the deepest, darkest, lushes of blacks – a special tribute to the skills of Chicago-based printer Dennis McWilliams. The use of white space on the large sheets (like the use of silences in the music) is just as significant as the color. The two embossed triangles of The Kiss of the Infant Jesus are separated by slowly gradated bars of ink that run from jet to a whisper of gray. Ramirez feels that as we decrease our resistance to Christ, a need for traditional symbols fades. The literal bars of the print fade and both Christ and the print become more accessible.

Like Messiaen’s music, Ramirez is creating a mood from a visual image that reflects both feeling for the music and sound theology. He is concerned not with the conventional trappings of religion, not with any ritual observances, but with an inner devotion, a private world of the spirit that can open doors of mystical love to those sharp enough to perceive the keys his works proffer.

The print’s, like most of Ramirez’s work, started with rough postcard-size sketches. Then came the more precise full-scale study drawings. The plate-making involved the exhausting process of trial, dissatisfaction, revision, and applied ingenuity common to all good printmaking. Etching, drypoint, electrically vibrated drypoint, aquatint, engraving, mezzotint done with needles, rockers, brushes, and razors were all used to create the effects Ramirez wanted: extremely fine brittle lines; blind printing, both raised and lowered; almost imperceptible gradients of shading. Making the prints was, as is always for sensitive artists, a lesson in patience and possibilities.

Twenty Contemplations is a suite of prints which, in their initial showing at the Art Institute of Chicago (January-March,1981), struck viewers with their utter simplicity and openness – a simplicity and openness that can be achieved only through the dogged elimination of absolutely everything not essential to the final vision. That process of refinement was clearly revealed by the presence in the exhibition of the 20 full-scale study drawings and many of the trial proofs, some of them in successive states. Ramirez pared his images until he had the sharp angularity, the sudden and arresting switches in directions, the darkness, the light, the silences of Messiaen’s music and, above all, the deep faith of both men.

Ramirez came to his interest in technique by a singular route. He did not go to art school until quite late; at 31 he enrolled in a class of late teenagers. He felt that, at his age, he had to listen, to absorb, to learn all his teachers were offering him on a now-or-never basis. He knew he had to prove himself quickly, with none of the indecisions and indiscretions allowed the youthful. So he took in everything his more-than-willing teachers offered him. He often speaks now of the debt he owes his instructors for both the information and encouragement they lavished on him.

He was a high school dropout who grew up in a tough, non-Latino neighborhood in Chicago. After dropping out, he did a stint in the Marines. Then he drove a truck for twelve hard, frustrating years. There had always been art in his half-Mexican, half-Croatian home. His father had a natural talent for illustration and his mother was very interested in music. But neither meant very much to him when he was young. He was adept at drawing in school, but it was a skill he accepted passively.

The twelve years in the tuck cab began to take their toll. He feared that the grind was wearing away his individuality. So he took to reading (at first Vance Packard and Studs Terkel); then he began to ask questions and philosophy offered some expansive answers. In 1971 he left trucking and enrolled at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. He wanted to study illustration and commercial art, following the lead of is father. Fortunately, the University offered no such course so he entered the general foundation program and threw himself into the work almost desperately. It is a tribute to the quality of instruction at the school and to the perception of his teachers that within one year he was invited into a student show. Less than two years later, still in school, he had his first professional one-man show.

The early canvases look like Ramirezes. He understood his aesthetic preferences from the start and could express them clearly, on canvas and in words. For about two years he made boldly colored works, sharply differentiated forms that dealt with the relationships of volumes and space. Through layered blues and greens slash pale green and orange lines to set the edges vibrating and hold the eye. Reality (such as bottles, walking figures, running water) was reduced to formal, logical shapes no longer holding any realistic associations. The paintings were essentially still lifes abstracted as far as Ramirez’s skills were then able to carry them. But for the theorist in him, they were works that fulfilled their potential too completely.

These early paintings were on a route that many others had traveled. Ramirez was a good abstract painter with an eye for unusual juxtapositions, more subtle than most other artists interested in optical effects, but the canvases seemed to say all they had ton say at once. They held nothing back for the participative imagination of the viewer and so were dead ends. They were just too self-contained for Ramirez’s comfort or satisfaction. He now considers them part of a valuable learning process.

So Ramirez started in earnest to apply to the making of art some of the philosophical, musical, and theological principles he had been exploring. He now felt better equipped to probe Wittgenstein’s thesis that every logical picture, by its nature, can contain contradictions of space that reconfirm its own tautological position as both knowledge of a subject and the subject itself. (A clear example of this is the Necker-Cube.) In the music of Schoenberg, Ramirez found the same equivalencies. Schoenberg’s tonal relationships deal with two interacting rows of musical language that move back and forth, relating only to themselves, dealing only with pure music.
Ramirez now understood that Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, and Thomist theology all deal with closed systems concerned only with themselves. They contain no certain knowledge applicable to the world beyond themselves, yet they all aspire to touch on it. This was a period of intense study, of driving labor to apply these concepts to the surface of a canvas and to find ways in which to use space and color to open both his own and the viewers mind.

Within a year he had refined his ideas and the painterly expression of them to the point where a distinctive style emerged – a harmony of forms, their proportions, colors, and order. A surface relationship to minimalism was now apparent, but inner complexities, seeming extensions of the visual planes beyond the canvas, the mysterious luminosity of the colors (including black), the sense of hushed wonder the large works inspired, all combined to make Ramirez’s work wholly his own. It roused an almost cult-like following in his many Chicago supporters, from collectors to critics, with widely differing aesthetic commitments. By 1977, every canvas was sold before it was dry. So it continues.

In a somewhat frustrating way, I have always found an emotional relationship between Ramirez’s work of 1976-77 and many of the huge, glowing landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. They look nothing alike, of course. But the moods Friedrich consistently summons of awe at the splendors of space, of amazement at the mysteries of light, are far more significant than his mere depiction of dramatic vistas.

The same is true of Ramirez. TL-P 6.421 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) consists outwardly of two large panels joined together and slashed by sharp verticals of purple-black separating red-violet-gray sections that fade away as they rise from the ground like dispersing mists, all floating before a spiritually pale pink-purple background. That’s what it looks like. But the TL-P is Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and the 6.421 is the section reading: “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.” Ramirez is here courting a visual-emotional experience for the viewer that conveys Wittgenstein’s sense of identicality, a painting that is ethically binding as it is aesthetically pleasing. Friedrich’s paintings were as aesthetically pleasing as they were intellectually challenging.

None of this is to imply that Friedrich had a direct influence on Ramirez. The artists to whom he is most openly indebted are Rembrandt, Redon, Seurat, Rouault, and in other ways, Mondrian and Newman. Rembrandt, Rouault, and Newman all used black as pivotal focuses of composition. Rembrandt particularly pulled subject matter into the light from intensely rich brown - black backgrounds. Rouault sculpted his figures in textured blacks. Newman was almost obsessional about the placement of his “zips,” the black bands on the canvas. Redon used black to point up ambiguities.

All of these elements have found their way into Ramirez’s work – adapted, transmogrified, subservient. The immense drawing done early in 1978, TL-P 5.6-5.641 / and she had black hair / ALSO (96 by 132 inches), brings many of them together in a particularly fruitful fashion. Rembrandt’s drama, Roualts sculptural sense, Newman’s immense care in the placement of the elements, Redon’s feeling for multiple meanings – all are present, plus something else. The drawing is primarily an exploration and a celebration of light. Through the use of intensely deep blacks – graphite used as both color and texture – Ramirez summons light out of darkness. The drawing seems to glow from behind.

The work was executed during a period of marital crisis for Ramirez. It was, in the artists words, …a reflection of conflict…an expression of love…an attempt to communicate the private, ineffable characteristics of love in universal terms.” Thus the drawing became an expression of both his emotional state and his feeling for his first wife.

Again, Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” figures in the title. The section this time is a long one covering several interlocking ideas. First the statement, “The world is my world,” then continuing, “The limits of language mean the limits of my world,” were clearly used by Ramirez as justification for the ominously dramatic nature of the drawing, the bold severity of the composition, the two sides pulling apart from the expanding area of the middle. The words and she had black hair is a reference to a fact about Ramirez’s wife and ties her to the drawing’s key color, a luminous, layered black. Also is the artist’s assertion that since he can express himself in a medium beyond the limits of language, he can move beyond the limits of his world.

Yet for all its controlled structure, Ramirez has kept fluidity in the piece. The grays and blacks shimmer back and forth as changing light does in a darkening sky. What you see at one glance may not appear when you look again. That is part of the ineffable aspect of art and again derives from Wittgenstein: “Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is.” (The drawing won the prestigious Logan Award at the Art Institute of Chicago’s 1978 “Chicago and Vicinity” exhibition and is now part of the Institute’s collection.)

Ramirez is a consummate technician. His canvases are painted with a matte evenness (often using an adaptation of house paint) that seems almost machine - made. He can grade a color from dark to light with a smoothness that suggests a blush rising to the surface of the skin. He uses his preferred brand of German graphite with virtuosity. How many artists can create an impasto with graphite? I know of no others. But through patience, fanatic care, an absolutely steady hand, and the power to stay at the drawing board for ten hours at a stretch, the graphite is built up, stroke by stroke, until it becomes three-dimensional. The surfaces shimmer, are deeply ridged, with their jagged edges capturing and reflecting light in exquisite variety. Once such a build-up process is started, it cannot be halted. It is a non-stop procedure. A stroke up produces one sort of light, a stroke down another.

There is always a special reverence for technique in Ramirez’s ideas. He insists that thought be straight and clearly expressed – on paper as words or on canvas and paper as images. He has trained himself to produce images that are, in themselves, extremely beautiful, beyond any significance they may have to his art. On more than one occasion he has explained that as an artist uses the total of all the techniques made available to him by history, he cannot do so passively, merely as a sponge. An artist must add to that total whatever he can for others to see and use. Thus, in some small way, the artist repays the past for what he uses from it.

Unlike many of the systemic theorists, Ramirez is much more interested in the beauty of his works. He is, of course, concerned with the system from which they are derived, their form and order. But he is also keenly aware of the power of beauty in a canvas to capture the attention and make a general point. This is, unfortunately, not a common concern with many painters today. They want to express themselves, to seek new functions for art in the world, to redefine in highly personal terms what art is. They are not particularly concerned with how there art looks to others: they regard the quest for beauty as an outmoded employment. As a result, many artists today are propagandists for highly personal points of view as much as, if not more than, artists. Chris Burden and Vito Acconci come most quickly to mind. They are willing to sacrifice the “look” of a work if it conveys their message.

Ramirez does not advocate his vision of beauty for anyone else. He understands that deliberate ambiguity about such a quality is necessary and desirable in art today. It was not so in the past. But in a work like “Weisses Bild: Gaudium et Spes, Ramirez feels he has achieved a unity of concept and execution, of form and idea, of appearance and implication or, at least, as close to a unity as he has so far come. For him and the viewer, the work is beautiful – the end-product of accomplishment, not an independent quality. But perfect beauty lies ahead, still to be found and realized.

It may sound from what I have written that Ramirez’s work has a cold intellectual look, that is unemotional. Nothing could be further from the truth about the art or the man. Usually laid back and calmly macho- looking, Ramirez has a volatile personality that swings from calm to storm as the emotional winds blow. Despite their ordered surfaces, restrained colors and cool looks, the works are often very arresting. In exhibitions they stop people in their tracks. Has Anyone Seen The Snow Leopard? (Ramirez’s version of Peter Mattiessen’s quest for the elusive beast-ideal) is done in radiant silver-black graphite that rivets the attention as a cat does with the semi-reflective depths of its eyes. The drawing seems to stare back, a disconcerting experience. In its own way, on its own terms, it is as winning as logic and as wooing as music.

Ramirez has had six one-man shows in Chicago galleries plus museum shows at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1977, the University of Chicago in 1979, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1981. A major debut exhibition takes place in Los Angeles in March.

His art burgeons as does his thought. His new works are physically more complex than any that have preceded them. The canvases are now often sculptural. Weisses Bild: Gaudium et Spes, a work based on one of the prints in the Messiaen suite, utilizes a stretcher that flares out at one point, runs from thin to thick at one end, and draws the canvas back at one point to make a shadow-compositional line where none exists. There have been experiments in which the central panel has been painted and the remaining sections suggested for the viewer with string and tacks.

There are now vast areas of dazzling white – tightly textured and catching the light from every angle. There has been much talk about a return to bright colors. Red, which has not been used since 1974, floats in and out of conversation , a color with high emotional and theological overtones. Whenever you see him, the artist bursts upon you with new plans for paintings and new ideas.

For an August exhibition, Ramirez turned to photography. He became briefly literal and used music manuscript paper as a bridge between his images and his desire to visualize certain aspects of musical theory. The prints he made were stark and smooth with an architectural look. It seemed logical. Music paper and a draftsman’s graph paper have much in common.

Will Ramirez follow this lead? He has made a few other prints in the series, but it is hard to say, even for him. This fructifying decision is as it must be with a person who is artistically curious and intellectually alive. The solution to one problem automatically suggests another problem.

Ramirez’s reading also expands. He has recently turned to Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence and based several canvases on his interpretation of Endo’s vision of faith and suffering. He has also become interested in Etiennne Gilson’s Painting and Reality, a detailed exploration of the differences between what is visible and what is real. He continues to theorize and speculate. While preparing this article, simple questions often brought forth far-ranging responses that were more attempts by the artist to clarify and expand his own thinking than answers to my inquiries. Like any good artist-philosopher, he is wary of final solutions.

In essence, Ramirez is a classic rather than a romantic artist, one who appeals to the inner eye rather than to the gut. He sees his art – all art – as a reflection of the rand order that underlies everything. He is as much interested in making viewers think as in making them feel: in making them react as much as act. So he strives endlessly “to illustrate thinking” and seeks, by his art, to organize our vision, as the 12 tone composers ordered their music and so our hearing, and as Wittgenstein ordered his logic and so our thought processes. Perhaps, like Shusaku Arakawa, he strives toward “a new definition of perfection.”

Ramirez would use his considerable skills as theorist-creator to learn all there is to know about whatever subject he is investigating: himself and his relationships (infinite); the Mystery of the Infant Jesus (ineffable); the relationship of ethics and art (they are one and the same); the ultimate form (silence), whatever.

But no artist, philosopher, or scientist can ever succeed in gaining, much less expressing, such knowledge. For, as George Schaller phrased it in another connotation: “There is no ultimate knowing. Beyond the facts, beyond science, is a domain of cloud, the universe of the mind, ever expanding as the universe itself.” Deep down, as philosophy student and artist, Ramirez knows this. But he continues the search – the unending search. There is no choice. As he said, his work is necessary to what he is.


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Dennis Adrian:Essays on Contemporary Art .

Dennis Adrian:Essays on Conemporary Art .
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

Sight Out Of Mind: Essays and Criticism on Art, Dennis Adrian, UMI Research Press, MI, 1985
Dan Ramirez: A Critical Survey of Form and Content

This exhibition of the works of Dan Ramirez is of special interest not only because his art is one of the high points of painterly and graphic achievement in Chicago in the decade of the seventies but also because the selection, presenting the artist's development since 1972, has been made by Ramirez himself. While the exhibition reviews the directions and accomplishments of the artist during this period in the examples he feels articulate the structure of these progressions in the most telling and concentrated way, it is not, because of the limitations of available exhibition space and the relatively large size of the paintings, a fully fleshed out retrospective of Ramirez's work. It is more the irreducible germ of an ideal retrospective that contains critically definitive works from each of the artist's developmental phases. In almost every case each work may be said to stand for a series of thematically connected works which should be seen together (or at least in several examples) in order to appreciate the polyphonic complexity of Ramirez's concerns. The groups of small preparatory drawings assembled in books or shown as groups comprise, the artist says, the repertoire of compositional ideas and thematic suites which are his central artistic concerns.

Superficially, Ramirez's work seems to belong to the current of geometric abstract formalism which has been such an outstanding, if intermittent, feature of American painting for more than fifty years. By and large this kind of painting concentrates on the relational harmonies and contrasts within arrangements of pure (and usually regular) geometric forms. The expressive content of such art is often its order, organization and system, simple or complex. Such structures, systems, and organizations are in fact considered the elemental syntax of what is called the "Modern Style" in art, architecture, and all forms of design. Because Ramirez's work since at least 1972 has employed such geometric forms anti their relationships he has from time to time been identified as belonging to this modernist-formalist current, but the artist himself has never been comfortable or satisfied with this evaluation. In statements in lectures, on panels and in his writings Ramirez has declared that his intent/on is to move beyond formalism (the articulation of line, form, color and space) to an expression of spiritual awareness.1

The formal development of Ramirez's art is significant in that it reveals the evolution of his expressive means. The earliest painting shown, the vertical Untitled of 1972, is a true abstraction in a somewhat old-fashioned sense in that the composition is, at one level, the severely geometric and two-dimensional reduction of a still life of objects upon a table. The blue and gray flat shapes abstracted from the solids and voids of the motif are enlivened with narrow lines of green and orange which hug the contours of the larger shapes and whose colors are adjusted to initiate chromatic reverberations with the prevailing cooler hues. This painting represents the stage in Ramirez's work when, in the ambiance of Roland Ginzel and Martin Hurtig, two of the artists most influential instructors during his undergraduate years at the Circle Campus of the University of Illinois,2 he set and solved for himself one of the classical problems of abstract formal and chromatic structure in a satisfying and accomplished way.

The Untitled diptych of the next year marks a critical step past the previous phase of traditional abstraction. The two halves present the same basic composition of large blue and gray triangular and trapezoidal forms, simpler now than previously. In the left-hand canvas blue, green and orange linear elements are tied to the edges of the larger basic forms, emphasizing and strengthening their order: in the right-hand canvas these linear elements have been freed from the edges of the larger forms to move across one another and extend from one edge of the canvas to another, adjacent or opposite. Already in the Untitled diptych of 1973 the line assumes more than the traditional role as the demarcation of the interface where light strikes the edges of the elements of the motifs. The linear elements serve as illuminations of rational intellection, which divide and define areas of the canvas. This new relationship between the linear form and the underlying structure of larger shapes (which soon will merge into a ground) is the initial statement of the compositional focus of Ramirez's work for the next four years.

Throughout 1973 and 1974 the new role of the line in Ramirez's painting has varied aspects: the line operates as a border for the central enclosed field which is itself horizontally bisected by another, more slender line; the lines vertically bisect the field which is now modularly divided into vertical panels which are punctuated and divided by them. At this time the paintings have dimensional projections sometimes but not invariably corresponding to the large forms of the "field." In 1974 the line clings to one edge of the canvas but is tapered, appearing to vanish at its point of origin but in fact continuing on the adjacent surface of the edge(s) of the canvas. Also the "field" forms are larger, lighter in hue and the paintings are stained into unsized canvas to produce the sense of a radiant transparent color rather than the earlier opaque hues: the canvases become large, up to 84 inches vertically.

In 1975 and 1976 the pictorial format stabilizes as large vertical rectangles frequently about 96 by 60 inches: the tapering lines at and extending around the edges now flash rapidly around all perimeters of the painting; there are further thinner even lines dividing the now very large "field" forms and these lines, while of unvarying width, are subtly modulated in hue along their lengths. The glowing transparencies of the field areas are themselves delicately modulated through wiping very diluted pigments into the unsized canvas. By late 1976 the large vertical rectangular formats are joined in pairs. The result of this process (a physical convenience in dealing with the large 8 by 12 foot dimensions), which seems at first like the joining of two independent compositions, introduces compositional elaboration's: for one thing, the flash of tapering line at the edge of one canvas will now appear as within the overall format. In addition, the visual line of the physical join of the sections echoes and intensifies the line beside it. Furthermore, the narrow tapering line now actually occurs within the physical fields of the joined parts. The result of this further linear complexity is a sharply intensified energizing of the total pictoral field: the lines zip and flash around and within its component areas and the modulated colors of both the lines and the ground areas amplify and multiply these racing visual dynamics. In the chroma what might originally appear as simple monochromatic fields of tan, pale orange and blue, pink and violet often reveal themselves through the shifts of changing hue and value as complex, yet exceedingly subtle, interactions of various coloristic experiences. Another aspect of the new dynamism of the work of I976 and 1977 is an innovation in the formats of Ramirez's paintings. In addition to the paired big rectangles described above the artist introduces triangular elements: the rectangular sections are flanked with one or two right triangles of the same height, producing irregular or regular trapezoids. The result of these different overall shapes is a new sort of harmonious balance: the motion of the diagonal sides and the accompanying lines is set in equilibrium with the firm and stable rectangles. The stable harmony of the works of 1975 and early 1976 was activated dynamically by the within-the-field zipping lines of mid and later 1976 in the rectangular paintings. Toward the end of 1976 and in early 1977 the trapezoidal formats set the stability of the Ginzel and Gilman paintings in a chordlike reverberating harmony and equilibrium of color, line, painterly form, and pictorial format.

During 1977 the trapezoidal formats developed the previous year presented to the artist an additional series of compositional options: within the regular trapezoids the central panel becomes, first in a series of graphite drawings and then in novel compound works that combine drawing on large paperboard panels with triangular side elements abutted to them, the focus of visual activity. In a 1977 exhibition at the Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago, Ramirez showed, along with paintings, powerful graphite drawings which were not large in size (the sheets were 22 by 30 inches) but of an intensity which easily balanced the much larger paintings. This group of drawings was made with densely overlaid parallel strokes of wide black graphite: the effects are of paradoxical intensity. The dark graphite forms present a concentrated blackness of a curious atmospheric depth in the large surrounding area of white paper but, at the same time, the repeated stroking of the medium produces a burnished surface which is reflective, rather like that of polished leather. The intensely black forms illogically seem to emit light. The themes of these extraordinary drawings are the different compositional ideas which define the artist's principal formal foci: the trapezoidal form as the whole field, the vertical "central" rectangle flanked by narrow vertical tonally graduated forms, and various permutations of triangular and rectangular elements.

At the conclusion of this series of drawings, Ramirez projected the group of works upon which he is still engaged, in which the mysterious dark yet reflective graphite passages come to be integrated into large works in the scale of his paintings. This step receives its first full statement in the very large TL-P 5.6-5.64I / and she had black hair/ALSO (96 by 135 inches)3 recently acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago. In this work the artist has used three separate panels of laminated paper over Upson board attached to a wooden framework that is bolted together from behind. The integration of a large graphite area with painted canvas elements may be seen in the large, just earlier, TL-P 6.522. The formal issues in this and related works go beyond the simple relationships of the component forms of the trapezoid and extend into the mystical expressive powers of the delicate darkening gradations of the flanking triangular elements as they both contrast and reverberate with the shimmering dark lustrous rectangle of the central panel.

Still more complex formal and expressive interrelationships of form, color, and tone are explored in the watercolor, graphite, and Zipatone drawings and collages of late 1978 and early 1979. From these it is clear that the artist intends, in works of four and perhaps more component elements, to articulate his ideas in works of monumental formats of 6 by 10 feet and larger, the first of which is the concluding piece in the show.

The preceding paragraphs have been intended to outline or give a precis of Ramirez's principal formal developments. Since the artist strongly decries an exclusively formalist approach to his work, what then is Ramirez's art about? In talks about his own work and in written statements he has emphasized again and again that the particular formal relationships in his art are not felt to be independent of very personal associative expressions of spiritual find metaphysical experiences and awarenesses or "ineffable feelings.''4 The objective support (if any is needed) that can be observed in Ramirez's work as evidence of the primacy of intuitive or spiritual content can be found in the facts that he does not use predetermined sets of geometric or arithmetical proportions in the construction of his works; when asked how he determined the height-width relationship of the rectangular elements in his paintings, he replied that most often he lays out stretcher bars of different lengths on the studio floor until the one that is "right" is formed? 5 Ramirez's veilings of color and tonal gradations are similarly developed by eye and mind (Ramirez would say soul) in the process of each work. All this is consistent with his conviction that "the only concrete, comprehensible subject matter that in my opinion, can be articulated verbally, is the formal elements within a tautological structure.'' 6

If one accepts Ramirez's feeling that it is impossible to frame with words any comprehensive explanation of his work, what is there to be said about it? Clearly the artist does not intend to obviate all critical evaluation of interpretation: he insists only that discussion of his forms or means is just that and in no way an equivalent of the total experience of his work, expressively or structurally. However, the development of Ramirez's formal concerns allows one to suggest the general direction of his work in its principal aspects. The earlier paintings and works on paper in the exhibition show the artist in the first mastery of problems which deal primarily with the relational properties of two-dimensional angular and rectilinear abstract forms. The liberation of linear forms from the contours of the larger shapes described in the Untitled diptych of 1973 presented Ramirez, still largely within the framework of a formalist "relational" esthetic, with the means to articulate far richer visual relationships than previously. Furthermore, these new potentials went beyond the clear harmonies of large distinct shapes presented as two-dimensional planar areas. The more involved spatial suggestions created by the newly independent line were for Ramirez the additional means which let him feel he could move beyond merely formal problems and begin to express more of the "ineffable feelings" that are his true subject.

The step that Ramirez made here he feels is analogous to aspects of Wittgensteinian Wittgenstein philosophy7 in that purely formalist concerns are equated with the proposition that "tautologies show the logical or structural properties of their components''8 and that to go beyond this to embody metaphysical and personal concerns one can only make manifest or show them through the specifics of the work of art itself. In this progression Ramirez wishes consciously to unify intellectual mental understanding with metaphysical things of the spirit and he sees his efforts as parallel to Kandinsky's ideas in the latter's Concerning the Spiritual in Art and to Arnold Schoenberg's attitudes toward the interrelationships between the structural nature of his tonal system and the expressive content of his music.9

For Ramirez the elements of form, line, and color must not only present a visual logic in their relationships which tautologically "show... logical or structural properties.... " but additionally present impressions of the "inner nature" or "spontaneous expressions of incidents of an inner character'' (Kandinsky).10 What sorts of "incidents" and "impressions" does Ramirez's art offer? He carefully avoids titles of any emotional specificity in keeping with his conviction that there can be no verbal expression of such things. But it seems clear that the artist's range of color (from pale, light filled hues to luminous blacks), the flashing activity of his slender linear elements, the vibrating striations of the parallel graphite strokes in drawings and compound works, and the idiosyncratic shape relationships set up among their component parts create heroic states of feeling akin to the emotional content of symphonic and other orchestral music. Ramirez has spoken of qualities such as "tragic,"' spiritual," and "contemplative" in association with his work. These are not specific or literal characteristics connected with particular events, as they might be in literature, but are internal experiences of the soul and belong to the realm of the poetic sensibility in its largest and most profound aspect.

Though Ramirez's art deals with these grand conceptions, their access to the viewer is not initially through intellection but instead through intense, even thrilling sensuosity and dynamism. The large shifting fields of varying hues in Ramirez's paintings strike one with an almost physical sensation, perhaps connected with their highly individual equilibrium of tonality and hue. The sharp flashing linear elements which both delimit and interrupt these fields are themselves of great chromatic complexity and intensity, seeming both to stabilize and energize the larger forms. Ramirez's personal sense of proportion and scale is something which one comes to recognize as idiosyncratically his after seeing three or four works: though the specifics of these proportions are determined intuitively and optically rather than conceptually, they have a family kinship through their common origin in the artist's individual sense of form.

The finish and execution of Ramirez's work contribute much technique is fastidious and crisp but never suggests means other disciplined, fully responsive hand of the artist, even m works where there is some necessary technical intermediary such as in the unique embossed drawings and etchings. In them the foldings and creasings of the sheets, the tones and colors of the printed and drawn lines offer the same paradoxical contrast of elegantly meticulous execution with a highly personal style and composition that distinguishes the paintings.

The special achievement of Ramirez's art is his work attains with such an economy of formal means. In this way he seems to surpass the functions of rigidly formalist, minimal, or conceptual art wherein the artist often wishes to remain within the predetermined limits of some proportional, serial, or other system of form. There has been in fact an increasing recent critical dissatisfaction with what are felt to be the confining possibilities and repetitively demonstrational character of this kind of painting and sculpture.

Ramirez can be regarded as among the most important of recent American artists who go far beyond what some see as the mere solution of design problems toward a more richly expressive kind of art which returns to the full range of human emotional awareness as its central concern while retaining the traditional formal vocabulary of modern geometric abstract art. It is important here to state that Ramirez does not regard himself as the extension of a minimalist or conceptualist tradition but rather as having evolved independently of them and more akin perhaps to intuitive formalists such as Barnett Newman Barnett Newman or Mondrian Piet Mondrian, who both retain an intensely personal inflection of feeling, structure, and execution in works of deliberate spareness. Ramirez's own tastes and interests in art are not limited to purely abstract traditions, and he has felt uncomfortable at being identified with doctrinaire abstract artists who feel that a specific type of form or format is itself an indication of purity of intention, contemporaneity of style, and a guarantee of qualitative achievement. He has been equally exasperated by critics who wish to see in his work a specific and even referential response to the urban Chicago environment, specifically its modern architecture, and has said that despite superficial resemblances to regular or modular architectural schemas in his work the roots of his art lie within, in an inner vision of artistic necessity and are basically misunderstood if regarded as responses to the Chicago (or any other) environment.11

Likewise, the notion of Ramirez's art as a series of personal icons misses the point. The iconic statement, however personal, must reduce and concentrate the specifics of a concern or idea that is at least partly conceptual or verbal or that is drawn from such elements. Ramirez's works are informed and suffused with states of deep feeling which can only be presented in the objective reality of each work: they do not capsulize, symbolize, or stand for these experiences but embody them as the final result of a causality originating within the artist's internal awareness and processes.

The power of Ramirez's accomplishments is special, too, in his synthesis of intellectual probity through the intuitive rationalism of his forms and the universal and cosmic states of expressive feeling that his art so radiantly holds. In this he feels himself akin to the line of development of this sort of content from Friedrich Friedrich to Rothko (and beyond) described brilliantly as a major current of modern artistic sensibility by Robert Rosenblum.12 As Rosenblum pointed out earlier, this is a continuation and development of the eighteenth- century enthusiasm for the Sublime.13 It is this area of high and expansive feeling, plucking an almost physical chord of sensation about the metaphysical awareness of man's experience of his place and condition in the universe, that is Ramirez's grand métier.

1 Daniel Ramirez, "Expression as Tautology: The Selfish Act (a case for metaphysical man)," Unpublished M.F. A. thesis. The Department of .Art, The University of Chicago, Chicago, 1977. David Elliott, "Painting in Chicago: A battle, but there's triumph in it, too," Chicago Daily News, Panorama Section. January 22-23, 1977, p. 12.

2 He also acknowledges debts of influence to the painter Vera Klement and the collagist Robert Nickle.

3 In the titles of Ramirez's work, TL-P refers to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the numbers to the series of propositions included in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

4 See Polly Ulirich, "Pushing hard in life and art," Chicago Sun Times, Showcase Section, June 4, 1978, p. 8; Elliott, op. cit., pp. 3,12.

5 Conversations with the mist, February 1979.

6 Ramirez, op. cit., p. 15.

7 The relation of Ramirez's work to Ludwig Wittgenstein is described in Buzz Spector, "The Axiomatic Image: The Works of Dan Ramirez," The New Art Examiner. Chicago 6.6 (March 1979), 6-7.

8 Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, p. 46 (quoted in Ramirez, op. cit., p. 2).

9 On Kandinsky and Schoenberg see Ramirez, op. cit., pp. 10-13 and 16-19.

10 Donald Mitchell, The Language of Modern Music, New York: St. Martins Press. 1970, p. 137(quoted in Ramirez, op. cit., pp. 17-18.).

11 Panel discussion in conjunction with the exhibition "Chicago Abstractionists: Romanticized Structures" held at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Art Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri,
March 1978.

12 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

13 Robert Rosenblum, 'The Abstract Sublime"Artnews 59 (February 1961), pp. 38ff.


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Metaphor For The Sublime/Devonna Pieszak

Celestial City#9
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

Metaphor
For The Sublime

The Christian Science Monitor, 1988
Devonna Pieszak


The 20th-century artist often seems like a quasi-scientist. He experiments with line, form, color, and space, explores new materials and technologies, and seeks to expand the definitions of what art can be and include. The first abstractionists wanted to purge art of the representational. They often felt that the content of their work was metaphysical, mystical, or metaphorical.

In the early 1900’s the Russian artist Casmir Malevich Malevich sought “pure expression without representation” and cleared the decks quickly. He sounded a primitive chord by placing a black square on a white background. Wassilly Kandinsky sought the “spiritual” in complex harmonies in his multitonal expressionistic abstractions. Piet Mondrian, who felt that man’s existence was becoming more abstract and divorced from natural objects, erased all but the calming chords of vertical and horizontal oppositions played against the counterpoint of primary colors.

Dan Smajo-Ramirez echoes the concerns of these artists. He incorporates the idea of the sublime in his art, but he rephrases it into his own distinctive song. Like all of them he views abstraction as a conveyance for feeling.

Smajo Ramirez’s paintings take their basic shape from geometric form – the trapezoid, rectangle, or triangle. The inspiration for them is based on an elaborate intellectual structure inclusive of philosophy (Wittgenstein ), music (Webern and Messiaen), theology (Aquinas, and 19th-century German Romantic landscape painting (Caspar David Friedrich).

The paintings, however, that spring from this specific, scholarly mix become approachable, contemplative refuges where light is the distinguishing feature and ambiguity a surprising constant. His painting has been shaped by his single-minded pursuit of metaphors for the sublime and his desire to create representations of the spiritual.

To do this he has, in an interesting reversal, incorporated the romantic ideals of Friedrich, who, like Smajo-Ramirez, wanted to depict “the ineffable, the immeasurable” with a “sense of distance and expanse” by portraying “the immensity of the elements found in nature” – the sea, the plain, the sky. (Interestingly these elements are very much a part of the real landscape around Chicago, where Smajo-Ramirez has lived). The phenomena of light and atmosphere – fog, twilight, clouds, haze, setting sun – were part of Friedrich’s means of making “infinity perceptible.”

Light and atmosphere are also Smajo-Ramirez’s principle means of transmitting his ideal. He has, however, controlled his romantic fervor by enclosing it in the calming rigors of geometric form. In his highly poetic paintings, the precise forms are tranquilized by a benign atmosphere that is ambiguous, being imprecisely water, mist, or serene light of no known source or substance other than the paint itself.

In the elegant painting “Celestial City No.9” we see how Smajo-Ramirez captures an ethereal atmosphere within a trapezoid form. This painting appears to be made up of two distinct flat planes. The back plane starts at the bottom with dark washes of a deep violet – whose wavelike value modulations fade into a pale hue. It is a monochromatic scale in which the color vaporizes. The faint echolike arcs within this light become a major chord on the front plane.

This plane is divided into three sections, each with a graceful arc or arch implying a building without defining one. Here the darkest shading of reddish and silver gray hues starts near the top, fading out in either direction. The center arch panel of this plane also appears to be slightly concave.

To add another voice to his polyphonic mix, he has drawn incisive lines on top of this front plane. Two of these define the panels – implying their separation – and the others play arc like melodies across the surface and remind us of the paintings “real” opacity.

In these ways Smajo-Ramirez has set up a series of ambiguities over which the eye moves gracefully, shifting between the concrete and the ethereal. The complex visual fluctuation and interaction have created the illusion of space that seems strictly and narrowly defined. At the same time it is emotionally expansive, implying an infinite atmosphere barely contained within the explicit geometry.

Recently Smajo-Ramirez has added more obvious, three-dimensional ideas to his paintings as in “Veritas/Lumen/Res No.10.” Here the previous spacious quietude is jarred somewhat, and delicate nuances are punctuated by more insistent curves carving into the painting.

Contrasting the ethereal background with the now more obviously concrete foreground, he has defined the idea of a window or passage with actual perspective lines and an implied perspective on the arc side. These lines poke holes in the flat planes they outline, forcing the misty gray light back and a bright yellow to shine in a chink.

Smajo-Ramirez reinforces the presence of an implied architecture with the help of a heavy purple impasto of block-like brushstrokes on the arc section. These strokes lighten in color into the pale yellow of the gel medium that gives the paint its texture. Simultaneously the sharp black lines also repeat the two-dimensionality of the painting.

The painter has manipulated geometric shapes and paint into a complex metaphorical statement that matches the intellectual structure that acts as its inspiration.

These are beautiful paintings, but their deliberate complications seem nonetheless to be simple fragments from a landscape of light. Their exactness of measure and proportion contributes significantly to the feeling that they are harbors within which we can find a measure of spiritual refreshment.


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The Axiomatic Image/Buzz Spector

TL-P 5.6-5.641:and she had black hair:ALSO:Art Institute of Chicago
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

The New Art Examiner/ March 1979
The Axiomatic Image
The Works of Dan Ramirez

The New Art Examiner has requested a number of critics to write an extended piece on the work of a single artist of their choice. This essay by Buzz Spector on Dan Ramirez is third in the series.

by Buzz Spector

I first met Dan Ramirez in September 1976, when we were both graduate students in art at the University of Chicago. He stood out among his classmates, being both older and more definitely committed to a particular mode of' art-making. Despite the increasing demands made upon his schedule by the momentum of his already established exhibiting career, he freely gave of his time to talk about the issues raised through his own work and that of others in the graduate program. We worked together for a year, until Dan finished, picking up his M.F.A. and moving into a loft west of the Ontario-Hubbard gallery nexus. We kept in contact, though, and shortly after I graduated from Midway Studios. I rented space in that same loft, joining Dan and four other artists. From this vantage point, across the hall, I have watched his continued growth-both as a maker of things and as a thinker about them. In his passionate commitment to quality in his own art, and his uncompromising yet compassionate viewpoint towards the works and ideas of his fellow artists, he remains my friend and my best model for the sort of intellectual and emotional integrity which should attend the practice of art.1

6.31
Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, from the Tractatus

When the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago opens its survey of the works of Dan Ramirez this month, it will mark the first extensive institutional recognition of the paintings and drawings of this intense and energetic artist from Chicago's Southside. Since his first solo exhibit, at Don Roth's Blackhawk restaurant in 1974, Ramirez's art has been seen with increasing frequency, and with increasing critical acclaim. Through four subsequent one-artist shows, and appearances in a number of museum and institutional group exhibitions, Ramirez has moved to a central position within the Chicago art community. Consistent through all his recent exposure has been enthusiastic critical support. In fact, one rather unusual feature of Ramirez's body of work has been its ability to draw support and appreciation from critics and reviewers holding extremely divergent, if not contradictory, attitudes about what determines quality in works of art. It is my belief that this critical response has been as much to the philosophical stance which Ramirez takes toward his works-and his responsibilities as an artist- as it has been to the technical and conceptual merits of the work itself.

For the past seven years Dan Ramirez has been making an art of extraordinary visual clarity and restraint-an art whose attention to rigorous structural logic is exacting in the extreme-but an art whose significance in large part rests with the absolute faith of its maker in its evocation of the sublime. A belief in the possibility of that faith becoming manifest through the artist's imposition of meaning upon his works-ascribing a spiritual essence to the elements of his paintings and drawings by means of an argument drawn from the popositional method of Wittgenstein.

Through his works and through the argument which accompanies them this 37 year-old graduate of the University of Illinois' Circle Campus and the University of Chicago means to communicate an ideal of self to the world. This is an ideological stance, which has been pursued by many artists of the post-Abstract Expressionist era, but few have taken it with both the energy and activism of Ramirez. It is a position which has driven him to produce simultaneously perhaps the most formally cohesive and critically respected body of art works among Chicago's emerging generation of abstract artists, and a series of statements, both written and verbal, on the relationship of metaphor to language and art which he is presenting as part of his application to candidacy in the Ph.D. programs in Ideas and Methods and Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

The crux of the matter for Ramirez is his belief that neither his work nor his reasoning for it are sufficient, in themselves, to communicate his faith to the world, but that through the interweaving of his methods of philosophical investigation and artistic execution, the message may be expressed. In summing up the attitude behind his methodology he says: "It is a personal response to a very frustrating situation: the inability to articulate and justify the metaphorical validity of the works [of art] in question." l
Art excludes the unnecessary, Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities o£ painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are paths of brush on the canvas. These paths lead only to painting.
Carl Andre, "Preface to Stripe Painting" Sixteen Americans, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959.

Andre's text, like the painting it describes, has become part of the critical context of modernism. It locates the absolute validity of painting (and by implication the practice of any artistic discipline) in the reduction of its elements to that which is "necessary" to the practice itself. In Stella's irregularly shaped canvases of the early 1960's the pictorial field was a function of the pattern that governed it. Andre, along with Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Sol Lewitt, extended this notion of the interrelatedness of form and subject through Minimalist Art-generating the criteria that a work of art be geometric in shape, basic in structure, monochromatic, its own object, bound by its own frame.2

The idea posited in the Minimalist stance is that there is an absolute order in the world, an order whose manifestation has been the concern of many human societies in the past-hence the Minimalists' ongoing interest in Middle Eastern and Asian art and history-and whose promulgation in modern technological society was best engendered through the materials of that society. For the Minimalists, the perception of that order via the Minimalist situation was equivalent to the sense of calm and order provoked by the dolmens at Stonehenge, or a Japanese formal garden. Of such gardens Andre has written, "These are places charged with a great calm, a very strong calm and a feeling of, if one cannot really contain the universe, perhaps, in one's mind, then in these gardens one has the very secure feeling that one is contained in the universe."3

Aside from its emphasis on industrial materials and fabrication, there is in the Minimalist position a strong conception of "place" as an active element in the perception of order. It is an idea of place whose ontological resonance comes from its attachment to the notion of where something is, or the creation of a place by a work. That is the awareness of one's position in relation to the (Minimalist) object, and, hopefully, perception of the object's orderly presence, makes possible an awareness of one's position in relation to the universe-the provocation of that awe serving as the works' function. Operating behind this line of reasoning is a contextually oriented attitude towards the installation of works, which has lead the Minimalists to graft-by means of argument outside the realm of direct sensory experience-the situation of the formal garden onto the situation of their work in a gallery, in effect asking the viewer to deal with the gallery space as a sort of shrine.

For Dan Ramirez the problem with this position is its essentially passive association of meaning with perception and material as structure rather than with practice and material as metaphor. The structure dictated by the materials of Minimalism is meaningless to Ramirez in that it refers only to itself-unsupported by the argument which seeks to analogise those materials to the space in which they are displayed. By subverting the associative (and thus, metaphorical) potential of their materials, the Minimalism locate the responsibilities for their works' content outside themselves, in the contextual value which accrues to the object through its placing in a particular site.

In his proposal addressed to the University of Chicago's Committees on Ideas and Methods and Social Thought, Ramirez writes, "When an artist presents his work, the work is not the interpreter of the information; the artist is, in conjunction with the [viewer's] response. The work is no more than an extension of the human being who made it. The work can never be absolute unto itself."

Ramirez's feeling is that the reaction by a viewer to a Minimalist work in situ is a situation essentially without value. The viewer's response is behavior in a real enough sense, but it is not a response to the presentation of self

by the artist. And for Ramirez the presentation of self is absolutely central to the valid creative act. Ramirez equates the practice of his painting with the practice of faith. He bases his own apprehension of the success or failure of his works upon his use of the medium-whether paint or graphite--as the metaphor of revelation, a "seeing of the light," He says, "Paint is metaphor. It's about the idea of light. Your medium is metaphor. For an artist to paint and deny this metaphor is absurd."
Between the idea/And the reality
Between the motion/And the act
Falls the Shadow
T. S. Eliot, from The Hollow Men

In the shimmering, aurora-like surfaces of his painting, by the silvery sheen of his more recent graphite panels

Ramirez presents a glorious actualization of light. The references to atmosphere-the sun-flushed dawn-are vivid

and compelling, especially in the paintings, but even the interstellar blackness of his graphite drawing TL.P S.6-5.641/and she had black hair/ALSO (recently purchased by the Art Institute) yields an austere metallic gleam.

One particularly striking visual meditation is Ramirez's TL.-P 6.42.1, the last painting he completed before leaving Midway Studios in March, 1977. Its two 5 x 8-foot rectangular canvas panels are bolted together by their long axes. Each panel is in turn divided into what can only he described as areas of space, upon which Ramirez has patiently worked a multitude of thin washes of violet and lavender acrylic pigment, building up a varying sequence of tonal gradations. The washes gradually gain in intensity, resulting in a rendered light with palpably romantic overtones.

Like the German Romantic painters Caspar David Friedrich and Philip Otto Runs-whom he much admires-Ramirez creates an atmosphere here charged with mystery, evoking a premonitory awareness of spaces within which something is about to happen. These spaces are energized and given emanence by the painted lines within which they are bound. Darting, thrusting, here bold, there ethereal, Ramirez's panels are contained by taut strands of line.

Straight, suggestively geometric, and insistently demarcative, Ramirez's lines are dazzling in their incisiveness. If the artist's rectangular or trapezoidal fields of space glow with sublime silence, then the lines which course through them sound a devotional note. Ramirez is a genius at applying a line whose breadth is just right for its context, tensely balanced between the ether of his field and the weight of his format. The lines inflect and add incidence to Ramirez's painted surfaces, generating sufficient compositional variation to prevent the viewer from focusing too strongly on the objectness of their support.

While the paintings bring forth an atmospheric emanation, emphasizing the transparency of their medium, Ramirez's graphite drawings call attention to their surfaces, almost celebrating their objectness and material qualities. These are challenging works, less visually accessible than the artist's paintings. For one thing, the chromatic analogy between Ramirez's pigment and sky colors is not present. The reference here is to reflected light via the metallic sheen of his surfaces. Also, the evidence of Ramirez's working method is more obviously present. Instead of a nacreous diffusion of acrylic washes, the strokes of Ramirez's Lumograph pencils are stacked and contiguous-each ruled stroke clearly defined if you examine his drawings' surfaces closely enough. The obsessive deliberateness of his stacks of horizontally ruled strokes builds up a materially weighty, yet visually flickering surface, activated by the lighting of their installation.

In some of these works, notably in TL-P 5.6-5.641…, the graphite is shaded into areas of matte black latex paint. The effect is startling, as the dense metal of the pencil suddenly evanesces into a black void. In its recent display at the Art lnstitute's Works on Paper show (where it was awarded the Frank G. Logan Prize), the 'gleam of its eight-foot tall rectangular center panel was inflected by the black latex vertices of the right triangular panels which adjoined it. The apparent nullity of the vertices gave way to graphite sheen just above the midpoint of the trapezoidal composition (at eye level), drawing attention to the edges along which the three panels were joined. The effect was to make those edges into virtual lines, slicing through the field and dematerializing the surface, much the way a jet contrail makes evident the depth of a sky.

TL-P 5.6.5.641...is a disturbing work, whose aggressive metal presence seems constantly on the verge of obscuring its subtler reflective qualities. Yet that extreme evidence of drawn line-becoming in its repetition a sort of splendid metal foil-is a dramatic bringing-together of metaphysical light and will. Here, more than anywhere else in Ramirez's works, does one sense a gift of light as an expression of execution, of the artist's will.

In the tripartite tension Ramirez engenders between line, field, and shape, the viewer encounters works of reductive, elemental simplicity and grace. But to deal with the wholeness of Ramirez's works is to encounter a logical as well as an experiential beauty. For each work is but the final step in a devotional research of visual logic by the artist. The process begins at a minuscule scale in the sketches by which Ramirez investigates the possible combinations of elements which could make up a work to follow.

In a recent conversation he said of them, "The sketches are visual metaphors for my searching. The little drawings are closer to writing than to my finished paintings. They are the first record and documentation of my ideas."

Ramirez has spoken of a set of four criteria which he uses in refining the structural investigations of his sketches, criteria which he posits are necessary for expression and communication to occur, within the context of a given medium: 1) There must be a grouping of elements of a similar nature; 2) There must be potential for a logical (axiomatic) extension of the elements 3) There must be a context for the conclusion; and 4) The conclusion must be possible within the structure given.

Without going too deeply into the arena of symbolic logic, it can be said that these criteria are as applicable to statements of language as they are to objects of art. Ramirez goes on to say that language, both spoken (aural) and written (visual) is metaphorical by its very nature, and further, that all metaphors, whatever their medium of presentation, function equivalently-as axioms of "the infinite." This is a usage of "infinite" charged with a poetic sense of the sublime, yet it is coupled with "axiom," the mathematical reference to propositions regarded as

self-evident truths. There is, however, a second mile of axiom which brings us closer to the real sense of Ramirez's assertion: that it is a "maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merit.' As acceptance thus becomes a form of belief-of faith based on meritorious qualities-so Ramirez's propositions become a sort of catechism requisite to his vision of the appropriate practice of art.2.182
Every picture is at the same time a logical one.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, from the Tractatus

At one point in the Tractatus Wittengenstein examines the phenomenon of the "Neckercube," that odd illusion of isometric projection in which a cube reverses its spatial relationship to the paper it is printed upon depending on which set of axes the viewer focuses on first. For Wittsenstein, the two possible points of view became two "facts" about the drawing. But to render such a cube so that those two points of view are entwined is to make it-apparently-an impossible state of affairs. The drawing is tautological in that the knowledge it imparts is but a rephrasing of its subject. Yet, it is a false statement since the plane (A) cannot be in two places at the same time.

For Ramirez, however, the contradiction is not complete, and in the following statement, taken from his proposal, he presents a response extraordinarily reflective of his belief in the ideal form of communication:

How does one determine what is actually here? One is tempted to say that nothing is here, it is senseless tautology, needless repetition, a pulsating back and forth. However that's not true! We have learned! It has communicated! We have learned that simultaneity is only possible in the form of a metaphor. It is not possible

in actuality. After all, we can believe the cube when looked at from the point of view of ...metaphor- a thinking process! For then it is LIKE THE IDEA , of simultaneity. But we cannot believe the cube if we believe our eyes, for that is a seeing process and we are looking at a LIE/

As far as this form of representation can describe one's point of view, the metaphor is PERFECT. The seeming ambiguity in the form of what appears as an illusion is an incredibly liberating device. It allows for CHOICE, for a given relationship: the possibility for clarification and understanding-the essence of a METAPHOR. "4

What was visionary in Wittengenstein was his awareness that the propositions of the Tractatus themselves were senseless, that they were simply metaphors for the inexpressible order behind them. As he said in the next-to-last of his propositions, "When [one] has used them-as steps-to climb up beyond them (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed it). He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright."

As Ramirez's works evoke that same order, they front a logical purity beyond discourse-but not beyond metaphor. They illuminate a sense of the sublime, reflecting a sensibility at once ascetic and romantic, And in this la simultaneous duality one grasps something of the relationship between the man and his metaphor.

Ramirez's writings, statements, polemics, all have at their core an insistence born of personal practice that the artist is a person committed to the communication of truth; which truth being of lesser importance than the axiom-as in Wittgenstein-that the totality of truths is the picture of the world. This is a strikingly romantic belief, one which demands an uncompromising personal integrity from its holder, but one which also allows the possibility of convergence between intellectual argument and spiritual faith. And in a time of unsettling transitions in art, and the world of ideas and things of which it is a part, a line of argument like Ramirez's becomes a model for a process of artistic self-validation based on practice, where responsibility and execution are united in the service of truth.

Unless otherwise noted, all quoted material comes from conversations between the author and Dan Ramirez.

1 Ramirez, Dan, Unpublished proposal to the Committees on Social Thought and Ideas and Methods, The University of Chicago, December 1978, p. 1

2 van der Marck, Jan, "Bernard Venet and the Rational Image," Artsforum, January 1979, p. 55.

3 Serota, Nicholas, Carl Andre: Sculpture 19S9-1978, White-chapel Art Gallery, London, 1978, p.19.

4 Ramirez, pp. 10-12.


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FRONT AND CENTER/Susan Blocker

Survoyeour (Detail)
Originally uploaded by lhombre.

Front and Center

Exhibit makes passersby
A big part of the art

Susan Blocker, Wisconsin State Journal
Sunday, April 21, 1996


It’s afternoon on State Street, and people are striding past the Madison Art center.

Focused on their destination, only a few glance in the picture window of the Art Center to see the art installation inside. Even those who do glance seem not to comprehend that they have, for a fleeting moment, become a part of the art.

A camera placed inside the window is capturing the passersby and projecting their moving image into a bank of television monitors along a wall opposite the window.

“I want my viewers to have that kind of opportunity, to have that kind of contact with the work…to become part of the work and, on one hand, to finish it, said artist Daniel Smajo-Ramirez.

The installation, “Survoyeur,” has several elements. First, it is based on an 1818 painting by German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.”

In the original, a man stands with his back to the viewer overlooking a misty mountain valley. Ramirez created a large black cutout of Friedrich’s figure and attached it to the window, apparently overlooking the Art Center space. He is holding a cane, which Ramirez has made red and white – like a cane used by the blind.

The floor between the window and the bank of televisions is covered with gravel, and gray rectangles are painted on the two wall of the room. The same cutout figure also is generated on the television screens.

A basic idea behind the work is to explore the ways to see and the ways to be seen. The man, for example, is both a surveyor ostensibly overlooking a mountain valley and a voyeur watching the antics of the people who are watching him.

That interaction of people with the installation has brought some surprising results, Ramirez said.

“I get some really, really, wonderfully spontaneous responses to that image,” he said. “It kind of unfolded on its own.”

First, people see the camera and televisions and realize they’re on screen – much as they would walking past a TV display at a Sears store, he said. Then they notice the black figure on the screen and assume it’s a projection from the larger figure on the Art Center window. (In fact, the figure is generated on each screen via computer.)

When they realize their image is positioned behind the black cutout on the screen, they try to “take some kind of control” over the image.

One man took out what appeared to be a razor blade and tried to rub the window to remove the black figure. Another took off his sunglasses and tried in vain to lace them over the figure. Others held up their umbrellas to shield the figure from the rain.

Inside the center, people have moved close to the camera and opened their mouths so they would appear on the television screen to be eating the figure.

For those viewers inside the center, Ramirez hoped to create a dual experience. One, with the gray rectangles and screens, conveys a sense of sterility, of the city, he said. On the other hand, “when you stood on the rock, you could feel the contrast on your feet – the feeling of the landscape.

That duality is another aspect of Ramirez’s work. He melds the very different worlds of his own minimalism and Friedrich’s romanticism.

The 19th-century romantics saw nature as a sublime, almost mystical presence. They “played with the human being relative to nature, the awesome power of nature, “ Ramirez said. “My own thoughts about that were, ‘I’m a city person. I’m kind of a concrete-and-steel kind of guy.’ That approach to nature was not something I was familiar with.”

Instead, in his early years as an artist, Ramirez turned to abstraction and minimalism.

“I was weaned on 1960’s minimalism,” he said. “On the one hand, I felt comfortable with German Romanticism, on the other, minimalism had some validity to it. I’ve always found the two a very strong part of my life, but they were two very different ideologies.”

So in “Survoyeur,” Ramirez keeps Friedrich’s figure, but replaces the landscape with that of modern technology. The idea is to take Friedrich’s romanticism, take it apart and “recontextualize” it in contemporary terms.

The sublime of the romantic landscape is not removed with the presence of cameras and television, but is redefined, he said. “Why is it only in nature that this sublime exists? Could you not have it from a television set?…I’m curious to what others feel.”


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