Juan Manuel Ramírez: “El Señor Caído”

July 6 – August 12, 2006

Young artist Juan Manuel Ramírez will delight us with his latest body of work titled “El Señor Caido” (The Fallen Man), a series of fresh, spontaneous ink drawings, executed with brisk brushstrokes that depict among other things, a drunken man that seems to be falling or struggling to get up. As Ramirez himself recounts, this project arises from a series of similar images of a fallen man, however, the image of the drunken man is the springboard for the artist’s creative process. Henri-Cartier Bresson´s photograph “La Villete” (1929), of a man dressed in a suit lying on the street, one of the images representing one of Jesus’ falls before being crucified, and Lorenzo Jaramillo’s drawings from the series “Suite de las muchachas extravagantes” or “Girl Crazy Overture”, act as important sources that impulse the artist’s imagination and define the nature of this exhibition.

Ramirez’s work is the result of his sensibility and intuition. The character presented to us in these drawings is the product of the artist’s imagination; it is the result of external influences and lived experiences. In this collection of drawings, the artist has chosen to focus on the individual’s posture that appears to be in movement within an undefined space. The character has been created with rapid and intense brushstrokes thus evidencing the importance of the line as the main element of expression. In some instances the spectator will observe the artist’s use of shades, in others he will notice his deliberate intent of leaving drips and accidents for the purpose of bringing forth an unpremeditated pictorial exercise. The drawings constituting “El Señor Caido” (The Fallen Man) are therefore a kind of figurative “action painting”, for they bring to mind abstract expressionist Franz Kline’s vigorous black brushstrokes on white backgrounds.

Juan Manuel Ramirez and his oeuvre are a clear example of the contemporary artist that, as E.H. Gombrich would say, “does not give himself to rebel gestures”. Ramirez is an artist that looks to the past with admiration; more specifically he looks back to great Colombian draftsmen as a means of enriching himself and his art.

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