January 26, 2008

Gothic Modern Sublime

New drawings by Dan Ramirez

Los Arcos de la Luz

February 8 – March 8, 2008

A conversation with Dan Ramirez led by critic James Yood

At Alfedena Gallery

Saturday, February 23rd at 2:00 p.m.

Chicago—Alfedena Gallery is pleased to announce a solo show of new drawings by acclaimed Chicago abstract artist Dan Ramirez, Los Arcos de la Luz, February 8 – March 8, 2008. This is the artist’s first solo show in Chicago in five years. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, February 15^th, from 5-8 pm. The exhibition is free and open to the public. A conversation with Dan Ramirez led by critic James Yood and sponsored by the Chicago Art Critics Association will be held on Saturday, February 23, at 2:00 pm. The gallery talk is free and open to the public.

Dan Ramirez has spent a 35 year career creating elegant, refined geometric abstract paintings inspired by sources such as Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the works of composers Arnold Schoenberg and Olivier Messiaen as well as the soaring ribbed vaults of Gothic cathedrals. Ramirez’s formal elements (monolithic, shimmering vertical and horizontal fields of elegiac acrylic washes, reverberating arcs of positive and negative space, evanescent gradations of graphite rubbed into raw canvas, razor thin tapering bands of impenetrable blacks and glowing reds) have created a highly personal lexicon of overlapping structures of logic --- linguistic, musical, architectural --- whose systems, though regimented, nonetheless provide an endless series of permutations for meditating on the sublime and the conflicts that arise when reconciling the relationship between the physical body’s spatial existence and its metaphysical aspirations.

Light is the defining formal element and emotional conduit in Ramirez’s work and that is especially evident in Los Arcos de la Luz (Arcs of Light) a new series of 17 drawings whose compositions are inspired by the Cathedral of St. Mary of Toledo, in Toledo, Spain and more specifically the decorative Tierceron Star design of its Gothic vaults. This series continues a body of work Ramirez began in the mid-80s titled the Celestial City series and several of these earlier drawings are featured in the current exhibition displaying the progression of Ramirez’s formal and conceptual ideas in using the negative spaces outlined by a cathedral’s ribbed vaults to create a tangible presence of deeply felt emotion from both the humble stark whiteness of the untouched paper as well as Ramirez’s deft tonal shadings through graphite and blue (a traditional symbol of the Virgin Mary) oil pastel. In many of the new drawings, collages of digital prints from compositions generated by Ramirez on the computer, a tool he has employed since the mid-80s, serve as a ground. As the artist describes, the light of the computer screen often allows him to “discover new possibilities in a composition through the monitor’s intense illumination” which he strives to recapture through more traditional materials.

Ramirez’s subtle touch, whether with wet or dry mediums, has always echoed the poetic surfaces of Jasper Johns’s graphic works in which the simplest design has the potential for multiple readings as long as the viewer has the code to unscramble the message. It is the delicacy of Ramirez’s hand in creating onion skins of translucent layers that elicits metaphors for the body in compositions that though abstract contain veiled references to the Catholic belief in transubstantiation in which bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Gothic architecture was designed to lead believers to heavenly light. Ramirez’s drawing skills reveal a remarkable ability to lead viewers of any denomination toward a transformative luminosity that turns solids into rapturous mists. In the process this new body of works transports the transcendental weight of his largest paintings to the intimate scale of a home altar.

Dan Ramirez is a professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He earned an MFA from the University of Chicago (1977), and a BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (1975). His work has been the focus of over thirty solo shows and has been included in over 100 group exhibitions. Reviews of his work have been featured in numerous periodicals including: Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. He is a 2005 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. In 2007 he completed a commission for McCormick Place West in Chicago. For this work, Ramirez applied his formal vocabulary to interpreting Chicago author Nelson Algren’s 1952 acclaimed prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make. Eight vertical paintings in the concourse are each 13 x 8 feet and take a different stanza of the poem as their inspiration. Using acrylic polymers sprayed onto aluminum panels, Ramirez uses his geometric vocabulary of horizontal and vertical bands of subtle and bold colors to evoke the sharp, staccato-like use of language employed by Algren to capture the human rhythms of the city.

To view images of the exhibition visit the web site, www.alfedenagallery.com.

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