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| Art Reviews, Painting | |
Ramirez (who’s work was unfamiliar to me before I saw it in New York) was an outsider artist, a schizophrenic who produced nearly 300 drawings during a fifteen year confinement at the DeWitt State Hospital in California. Seeing the show gave me the feeling of peering at a map of the human mind. Ramirez’s drawings have an urban quality. They’re dominated by tunnels and orderly processions of trains, cars, iconic cowboys and deer nibbling at the edges of suburban gardens. Ramirez’s use of strong black lines to define man made spaces brought to mind the sketches an inspired engineer might make in the early stages of planning a city or highway. Precise. Lines and stripes. Light and dark. Flat and deep. Paper bags patched together to make a beautifully layered surface just right for each drawing. What is a tunnel to an engineer? A city? A garden? Are the human environments we build for ourselves the inevitable conseqence of our human minds? Or a freak accident based on a long forgotten circumstance a long time ago? I love this stuff. If you’re in the neighborhood consider checking it out. The exhibit runs through April 29th. | |
Ooh! I had the exquisite pleasure of checking out the Martin Ramirez exhibit at the
