After her latest work characterized by geologic layers and high mountain profiles viewed form afar, Clara Ramirez in her new series called Woods, comes closer to the horizon and gets inside the woods, nature, rivers and cliffs, looking for a "natural home".

On canvas worked meticulously by addition of layers made with oil paint, from which emerge small protuberances, the artist tries to capture the energy and colors and reveals with contrasts the areas of shadow and light.

Her previous work is an ode to the geology of the mountain chain, drawing consecutive lines of the limit between the sky and land, in this new series of paintings she goes inside the womb of nature, seen from the surface on which the filtered light arrives.

Clara Ramirez has the high mountains of the Andes inside, as well as the placid nature of the northern hemisphere. In front of the mountains and the lonely woods painted by Clara Ramirez we cant forget that there is a permanent presence of the view of the artist that captures life, the earth, the rivers and the essential smell of earth.

Eduardo Garcia Aguilar

Colombian journalist, writer, poet, has written two collections of short stories,
two collections of poetry and three novels including El Viaje Triunfal, winner
of the 1993 Premio Ernesto Sabato. He has also published book-length studies
of Alvaro Mutis and Gabriel Garcia Marques.

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 covton 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 callig-
raphers 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” RAMIREZ tells us
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 paintings
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.

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.

Eduardo Garcia Aguilar

Colombian journalist, writer, poet, has written two collections of short stories,
two collections of poetry and three novels including El Viaje Triunfal, winner
of the 1993 Premio Ernesto Sabato. He has also published book-length studies
of Alvaro Mutis and Gabriel Garcia Marques.

MEMORY LANDSCAPES