The gesture where the sea is made
Enrique Ramírez
March 13th - April 13th, 2025
Michel Rein, Brussels
Installation views
About
Michel Rein is pleased to present 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 Ramírez
