El lento clamor del viento
Enrique Ramírez
September 6th - September 23rd, 2023
Michel Rein, Paris
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About
Water is at the heart of Enrique Ramírez's work: destructive, purifying, a source of life and death, healing, regenerating... The sea is the pre-symbolic whole from which Ramírez projects his ontological vision as a metaphor expressing the depth of being, its death and perpetual regeneration.
It is through the sea that Ramírez, a navigator, connects people, territories and history. Through the sea, the history of Chile is confronted with its demons, and the great tales of travellers, conquests, migratory flows, immensity, depth, movement and the call of the open sea intersect, touching on the origins of being and the world, their relationship and meaning. [...]
Enrique Ramírez speaks of art, of the work of art, as a window opening onto an elsewhere. A window built by questions about the world we have created. For him, creation is the possibility of an elsewhere, of a language that has not yet spoken, but which at the same time comes from the depths of life. Creating is an act of resistance to the world as it is, but also an act of persistence and hope.
Angeles Alonso Espinosa*
El lento clamor del viento is composed of a series of works of different formats, ranging from sculpture to video, the exhibition addresses themes linked to the memory of a place and the uprooting of the landscape. In The construction of time, 2023 (video 2 channels), Ramírez makes a parallel between the construction of a sail and the progressive disappearance of the glaciers of southern Chile. His video installation made as if it were a sound composition gives way to a robotic sculpture that produces, thanks to the water that imitate the movements of the sea, a series of melodies that invite us to travel in time. In this exhibition Ramírez traces points of union between a political thought, poetics and the relationship that is built between them, thus generating a critical journey around the landscape.
In 2023, three works by Enrique Ramírez joined the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris). His work are in prestigious collections such as the Pinault Collection (Paris); MoMA (New York); Kadist Foundation (Paris, San Francisco); Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration (Paris); MAC-VAL (Vitry); Pérez Art Museum (Miami); Museo Ampáro (Puebla); The Ama Foundation (Santiago), Fundación Engel (Santiago), Collection Itaú cultural (São Paulo), Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Santiago); Fonds d?art contemporain - Paris Collections; FRAC (PACA, Bretagne, Nouvelle-Aquitaine).
Enrique Ramírez's work has been exhibited at the International Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017; Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires) ; UQAM Gallery (Montreal) ; Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la photographie (Arles) ; Le Grand Café - Centre d'art contemporain (Saint-Nazaire) ; Kunsthalle Bielefeld (Germany) ; Museo Amparo (Puebla); Centro Nacional de arte Contemporáneo (Santiago); Palais de Tokyo (Paris); Museo de la Memoria (Santiago); Kadist (San Francisco); Jeu de Paume (Paris); Museo de Bellas Artes (Santiago); Centre Pompidou (Paris); Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv).
He has been nominated for the Prix Marcel-Duchamp, the SAM Price and the Meurice Price. He has received the Prix de la Découverte from the Friends of the Palais de Tokyo and the Beyond Memory Prize for the video Brises. In 2022, Enrique had a major solo exhibition at Le Fresnoy in dialogue with works from the Pinault collection (curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Pascale Pronnier and Enrique Ramírez).
* excerpt from À la recherche du vent perdu, texts by Ángeles Alonso Espinosa, Gilles A. Tiberghien, Raúl Zurita, Toluca Editions (published on september 2023).
