BRUSSELS.- Michel Rein presents The gesture where the sea is made, the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery.
« ‘‘ What will we do...’’ (Que ferons-nous) ? The question appears in neon, illuminating a space of uncertainty and echo. Inspired by Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, this phrase resonates like a beacon throughout the exhibition, marking a threshold where displacement, borders, and identity intertwine in a play of gestures.
The gesture, in its repetition, in its fragility and strength, shapes this universe. It is the invisible thread that connects generations, territories, and cultures, like a map woven between doing and being. Each artwork in the exhibition is born from a manual act that is also an act of belonging: molding, engraving, sculpting, weaving, painting.
The ceramics evoke a language in transit, a fragmented script attempting to articulate the inarticulable—the experience of migration, of inhabiting a space that is neither here nor there. These are gestures that shape not only objects but also memories, as if each imperfect form were a fragment of a place left behind, a blurred recollection.
In the cement impressions of sails made by the artist’s father, the gesture becomes an imprint. The sail, a symbol of navigation and departure, is fixed in cement like an indelible mark of origin. Here, making is also a form of resistance: to preserve, to honor, to remember. The paintings, with their material and chromatic intensity, function as landscapes in transformation. They do not merely represent a place but embody the sensation of transit, of wandering. Like the sea, they are never static: color accumulates and fades, texture becomes a trace, and the painterly gesture turns into territory.
Painting is also an act of displacement, a way of capturing the ephemeral, of finding in the layering of pigments a possible geography. The sea, in its violence and beauty, takes form in the tapestry. The woven wool translates the vastness of the ocean into an intimate, almost painterly gesture. Just as in the paintings—where color and texture construct landscapes of transit and memory—here, material becomes movement. The sea is a border, a passage, a possibility; it is where gesture becomes eternal, where making transforms into an act of defiance and creation.
‘‘ What will we do...’’ (Que ferons-nous) ? The question lingers in the air, without a definitive answer. For the gesture, like the sea, never ceases. It is a perpetual motion, an invitation to continue building, crossing, belonging. » -- Enrique Ramirez
In 2022, Ramirez presented an important solo exhibition at Le Fresnoy, in dialogue with works from the Pinault Collection (curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Pascale Pronnier, and Enrique Ramírez).
Enrique Ramírez’s work has been exhibited in international venues, in particular at :
• the International Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017
• the Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires);
• UQAM Gallery (Montreal);
• École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (Arles);
• Le Grand Café : Centre d’art contemporain (Saint-Nazaire);
• Kunsthalle Bielefeld (Germany);
• Centre Pompidou (Paris);
• Jeu de Paume (Paris);
• Museo Amparo (Puebla);
• Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago);
• Palais de Tokyo (Paris);
• Museo de la Memoria (Santiago);
• Kadist (San Francisco);
• Museo de Bellas Artes (Santiago)
• the Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv).
He has been nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, the SAM Prize, and the Meurice Prize. He also won the Discover Prize from the Amis du Palais de Tokyo and the Beyond Memory Prize for the video Brises, 2008.
