2005

Geological layers, petrified oceans and imaginary cities
about the work of Clara Ramirez

by Eduardo García Aguilar

Through essential shapes, extracted from the deapest grounds of time and space, the work of Clara Ramirez goes much further than the first landscapes of childhood.
Where do these enormous cordillera ridges come from, these outlines of dis-tant mountains that Ramirez describes with great poetical economy, through such fundamental colours as white and black?
While watching the vast series of her landscapes, the viewer where ever he comes from, will be confronted to geological time, far from any immediate anecdote or folk reference. The urban cosmopolitan full of words and con-cepts or the peasant from Mongolia or Nepal expert on aromas and seasons, will find there their common denominator that only, can produce a work of art.
The more than millenial shapes of Ramirez, the cordilleras wavy outlines that suddenly collapse into precipices, into bottomless abysses, into still waters covered with young trees, into valleys washed down by old rivers, into foggy horizons, seem here to be extracted with geological patience, as meticulous as erosion caused by wind and rain on the earth’s crust.
In the work of Ramirez, there is no concession to representation resorting to easy colors, to anecdote or to artificial chaos for hiding what is true, what was found by anonymous artists of Altamira and Chauvet caves, great calligra-phers and China ink masters or Rothko and Malevitch in our times.
“The mountains come from inside me, they don’t represent a precise place and as they are from nowhere, they are from everywhere” tells us Ramírez with translucent lucidity, with the same truth as the poet’s in front of dawn or twilight.
Sky and earth, matter and spirit, black and white, river and mountain, tree and meadow, stone and moss, are the materials that spread out in these pain-
tings resembling geological layers or petrified oceans, waves on a ceaseless beach made of white sand and grey pebbles since always ground by the salty force of the sea.
In the excellent series of doubled or tripled landscapes, Ramírez creative strength goes further, chiselling the canvas and pummelling the clay walls for them to become large cities metaphors.
Over there, skyscrapers and avenues are built from the materials of a enor-mous quarry transported by a phenomenal interior strength, finally concen-trated into Ramirez hands, that polish constantly the essential colors for the miracle to happen of changing mountains into imaginary cities.
Ramirez large format paintings lead us to interior nature and to feelings geology, while diptychs and triptychs train the microscope lenses on stone the city is made of, on this conglomerate of stone exiled from the quarry to become city, cloth, pummelling, building, avenue or noise.
What have I seen in these Ramirez landscapes series ? From the first mo- ment, I did not have the slightest doubt I was in front of poetry, and poetry is the music of nothingness and of the whole. It is the freshness of regained childhood after having digged into rock in search of never seen gems, whose transparency lights up for a moment, before going through the reign of silence and night darkness in original woods and mountains.

Paris, 17 July 2005

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2004

MEMORY LANDSCAPES

Clara Ramirez marks the space that surrounds us from the emptiness that we surround. The emptiness then becomes a presence in space, an invisible presence, a silence, a contemplation : territories from which emerges a kind serenity. Her purpose leads to the great thing, connected in a pictural plane where material and witnesses of sensations distilled by her memory are mixed. Several visual orders meet and dialogue, to return to what settled on the canvas as the expression of a pure fact.

From the tiny springs out the whole. For, whatever the minimal she ends at, it remains something ranging about sensible and reality.
But is it maybe more: do we find, simply, the silent reflection of her inner life? For ”it’s in Man’s heart that lays the life of Nature’s sight. To see it, you have to feel it” as Clara Ramirez does. Her big canvasses, finally, they are trees, springs... pretexts in short, that slip away from all kind of speech and however draw near the mystery of the world.

Muriel Carbonnet, June 2002.