NADA 2021

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth by the Los Angeles-based, Mexican-American artist, Edgar Ramirez.  

Edgar Ramirez is an atypical painter. Drawing on his immediate urban environment, certain pockets of art history, and Post-Fordist philosophy, Ramirez makes paintings his own way. The subject matter of his work comes from the anonymous signs– We Buy Houses, Fix Your Credit, etc– that parasitically populate low-income neighborhoods all over Los Angeles as well as America. Appropriating the look and language of these predatory signs, he paints them in a multitude of colors on cardboard and then subjects them to a rather violent process of subtraction which seems to exist somewhere between classical décollage and urban decay. The resultant images are variously reminiscent of the legacy of Nouveau Realism, the work of Los Angeles native, Mark Bradford and the Abstract Expressionism of say Clyfford Still. However, differing from his forebears, the exploitative specificity of the subject matter directly informs the formal decisions that Ramirez makes. The subtractive aspect of the work becomes analogous to the negativity of debt as a positive ontological feature of the contemporary human subject. You are by virtue not of what you have, but by what you don’t have, or rather, owe. By a similar twist of negative logic, these paintings could also be situated within a landscape tradition through their invocation of the harried urban fabric from which they issue. To Clyfford Still’s vast romantic conjurations of the American west, Ramirez responds with a symbolic horizon which is altogether more damaged and preyed upon. Nevertheless, the richness, texture and color of Ramirez’s paintings are characterized by a strident and explosive beauty, as if in protest, and in spite of everything.