In Enrique Ramírez’s work, landscape is never neutral. On the contrary, it is imbued with meanings, memories and conflicts. The land and the sea bear the marks of the passage of time and of violence, but they also absorb and rewrite them; they draw strength from them to be reborn. Born in Santiago, Ramírez finished his studies in France and currently resides in Paris. This biographical detail is not incidental, as it helps us understand how the artist’s vision of his own country is shaped by the effects of a distance that is not only physical but also mental, chronological, and, above all, poetic. Chile emerges from Ramírez’s works as a real and concrete country, but also, at the same time, as a personal and intimate (re)construction that cannot escape the traps and black holes of its recent history.
In what is his first solo exhibition at the museum, the artist presents a body of work produced, for the most part, over the last decade, and which has rarely, if ever, been seen here. For the occasion, Ramírez has also created two new large-scale works that expand upon and enrich the themes that run through his art and his thinking. Long in the planning stages, the exhibition comes to fruition at a particularly significant moment from a political and social standpoint, and indirectly invites reflection on the way in which, within the Chilean and broader Latin American context, memory and narratives are reframed and renegotiated constantly.
Jacopo Crivelli Visconti
Curator
