Frieze 2023

Mexican-American artist Edgar Ramirez’s latest body of work, made expressly for his solo booth at Frieze LA, concentrates on the semiotics of trade, exploitation and decay in Wilmington, Los Angeles, where he grew up. These signs include everything from what Ramirez refers to as PLPs (predatory loan posters) found on telephone polls around low income neighborhoods to the brands of shipping containers stacked up on the nearby port– Capital, Evergreen, and Siemens– as well as the name of the local, notoriously toxic oil refinery, Marathon. Together, along with the diverse textures of his urban environment, they form the semiotic crucible from which Ramirez draws direct inspiration to depict his immediate surroundings, and by extension, fashion an allegorical portrait of the more invisible, yet crucial components of America today. Appropriating the look and language of these signs, he paints them in a multitude of colors on cardboard, which he layers, and then subjects to a process of aggressive subtraction which seems to exist somewhere between classical décollage and (un)natural urban decay. The resultant images are variously reminiscent of Nouveau Realism, the work of Los Angeles native, Mark Bradford, Abstract Expressionism, and the prodigious pictorial elegies of Anselm Kiefer– all of which Ramirez credits as influences. These paintings could also be situated within a landscape tradition through their invocation of the harried urban fabric to which they refer. To Clyfford Still’s vast, romantic conjurations of the American west, Ramirez responds by semiotically embodying a symbolic horizon which is at once predatory, violent, damaged and pernicious. Indeed, for all their riotous energy, these paintings seek to take place in an epic and elegiac register, suffused by blight, exploitation and depletion. Nevertheless, the palpable texture, richness and color of Ramirez’s works are characterized by a strident and explosive beauty, as if in protest, and in spite of everything.