PARIS.- Michel Rein Paris is presenting Enrique Ramírez’s 4th exhibition at the gallery, following La Gravedad (2016), Los continentes (2016, Bruxelles) and Cartografías para navegantes de tierra (2014).
« Mar mAr maR is a repetition but also an act of resistance. It symbolizes the world’s resilience. Mar mAr maR is not just the sea, in the literal sense, but you, me, the other, the friend, the stranger, the “other” world which the media are abandoning for lack of interest, it’s the immigrant, the displaced person, the wrecked ship, it’s the silent complaint of the earth when it meets the sea.
When I imagine a work, I try to project myself into a place I’m not acquainted with, a place which I would like to enter and be transported through… A place where darkness would help to better see the light of images, that light which is not only there to get us to travel, but which also invites us to share ideas, and ways of thinking, seeing, feeling, and listening… The sea is like a window looking out over this world of mysteries and opportunities.
The works in this exhibition try to answer these questions. They draw a map whose outlines are inspired by the upside-down map ( America Invertida , 1943) drawn by the Uruguayan painter Joaquin Torres Garcia. This illustration of South America upside-down has become a symbol of the efforts made by this continent to assert its central place. Joaquin Torres Garcia put the South Pole at the top of the earth, like a visual statement of the importance of South America, offering another vision of the world and not the vision that the rest of the world tries to impose on South America.
When I think of my earth, I think of the sea. I think of a sea in the South American world, where the waters cling endlessly to what we call a terra firma. We have always been fluctuating, like a garden under everlasting construction, a world in constant conflict. We often have memories of vague memories, unstable images which our world is permanently altering, like a dispossession of history whose tale is never finished, like waves endlessly meeting the earth again and again… Mar mAr maR … a repetition, an act of resistance. » --Enrique Ramírez
Enrique Ramírez’s work has been exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennial in 2017, 7th Daegu Photo Biennial (South Korea), 13th Biennale de la Havane (Cuba), Museo Amparo (Mexico), Centro Cultural MATTA (Buenos Aires), Centro Nacional de arte Contemporaneo (Santiago), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museo de la Memoria (Santiago), Kadist (San Franciso), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Museo de Bellas Artes (Santiago), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), Video Art in Latin America from Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), Fondazione Ragghianti (Lucca), Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv), Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin), Musée des Beaux-Arts (Dunkerque). He was nominated for the SAM prize and the Meurice Prize for contemporary art. He won the Loop Art Fair, the Discover prize of Amis du Palais de Tokyo, the Beyond Memory Prize for Brises video.
His work is part of prestigious collections as MoMA - Museum of Modern Art (New York), Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco and Paris), PAMM - Pérez Art Museum Miami (USA), Collection Itaú cultural (São Paulo), Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Santiago), FMAC - Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain (Paris), Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (Paris), FRAC PACA (Marseille), FRAC Bretagne (Rennes), Conseil départemental de Seine-Saint Denis (Bobigny), Museo Amparo (Mexico) etc.
