Lopez Ramos "Virtual Collages" now available

This body of works approaches images as found objects while appropriating printed materials that fall into the interest field of the Wonderland series mostly through a high-resolution scanner turned into a peculiar camera obscura which reproduces the selected images with their peculiar textures and flavors that allows me to evoke in the utmost poetic manner the realities am referring to.

From this process a multilayered photographic image emerges, giving place to a new graphic object that is beyond the classic “ready-made” notion, as it is actually closer to a remodeled construction, an altered piece of clothing or a refurbished electronics: old objects to which a cluster of new meaning and qualities are added or insufflated.

Rafael Lopez-Ramos

Zarathustra, Confucius & Granny Say, 2012, digital print on cold-press bright 100 % cotton paper, 20" x 24". 

Edition of 25, numbered and signed by the artist. Price: $300.00

Document Enclosed, 2012, digital print on cold-press bright 100 % cotton paper, 20" x 24". 

Edition of 25, numbered and signed by the artist. Price: $300.00

 

Proust plus Five Saussage, 2012, digital print on cold-press bright 100 % cotton paper, 24" x 20".

Edition of 25, numbered and signed by the artist. Price: $300.00

Birthday and Missil, 2012, digital print on cold-press bright 100 % cotton paper, 24" x 20".

Edition of 25, numbered and signed by the artist. Price: $300.00

Grab that Cash and Make a Stash, 2013, digital print on cold-press bright 100 % cotton paper, 20" x 24".

Edition of 25, numbered and signed by the artist. Price: $300.00

Fabulous Beach Body, 2012, digital print on cold-press bright 100 % cotton paper, 24" x 20".

Edition of 25, numbered and signed by the artist. Price: $300.00

 

Get Fit Get Toned, 2012, digital print on cold-press bright 100 % cotton paper, 20" x 24".

Edition of 25, numbered and signed by the artist. Price: $300.00

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Don’t Swallow Your Gum or The Art of eating the bait without getting hooked

Dada is Death! Long Live Dada! That might be the cry of a 21^st Century schizoid man watching the new exhibition by Miami based artist Rafael López-Ramos. The world portrayed by him is polluted, noisy, visually obscene and trashy, as far as the eye can see, but also its many layers, beautifully overlaid one on the top of the other, allow us to perceive an integrated, and therefore, misleading reality. This reminds us that, in as much apocalyptic and chaotic as it may seem, it is in fact our ordinary and “objective” reality. Sometimes we need to pass through the artist’s eyes to find what is ridiculously obvious: that is, the hypnotic seduction of the chaos we are immersed in or... is it, indeed, the other way around?

As Jean Baudrillard brilliantly asserts in The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact: “This representation, this superstition of an objective reality held out to us by the mirror of the commonplace imagination, is itself a part of the general illusion of the world, of which we are a part at the same time as we are its mirror”. Therefore, this is arguably not just an aesthetic or financial chaos, but an epistemological crisis, as the artist stated in the group exhibition It is not the economy but the epistemology, which he curated for a local gallery in 2011. The advertising (as they euphemistically call commercial propaganda) not only impact and structure the features of human action, but it also affect the way people make choices, use means to attain ends, and learn to behave in the process. Even agreeing with Baudrillard that “the world does not exist in order for us to know it”, knowledge is itself part of the world and those little pieces of misrepresentation when putted together brings a whole new sense of “illusoriness”. That is what Rafael López-Ramos does in this exhibition: projecting and printing before our eyes some possible sequences of our twisted subconscious readings.

Yet, everything is the result of the supposed transit to civilization, the aesthetic construction created by the active workforce, the very motor of the development: the productive and eternally inspirational middle class, this wide population so easy to manipulate, because its lack of sense of belonging to an specific social group. Perhaps, this is the reason for Épater le bourgeois (to shock the middle class) has become an instrumental modus operandi in Rafael López-Ramos’ recent works. Shaking the faint-hearted yet laborious army of ants, front line victims of the iron rule of the markets is another way to psych out the system. And nothing more disturbing to a puritan American middle class than sex, sex smuggled inside ads, as a subliminal message, as a thrilling commoditized “object of desire”. Sex replacing politics, ideology, religion, playing the role of the most primal Freudian instinct; sex that bring the men in front of the mirror reflecting their inner sin, their own prostitution and submission to money, influence and power.

Trained under the provocative aesthetic Avant-garde of the 80’s Cuban Art, it seems a natural gesture to transport structures, rearranging the old anti-establishment discourse into his new sociopolitical reality. As a citizen artist of the free world, López-Ramos have been able to compare between the two main sources of ideological domination: the blatant political hegemony of a leftist dictatorship and the no less harmful and blatant, but in a way more subtle, submission to the dictate of the corporatocracy’s broaden powers (the banks-corporations-governments triumvirate), and his secular arm: advertising. Whether the first is a mere reminiscence from the past or a persistent dream, the second has become his very nightmare. How do we survive cynically and sane —behaving accord— and serve the life sentence in a precinct ruled by the world financial power, straight-jacketed as another commodity and surrounded by the brain-washing commercial advertising industry?

In López-Ramos own words: As Marshall McLuhan noted, “the ad men are constantly breaking through into the Alice in Wonderland territory behind the looking glass, which is the world of sub-rational impulses and appetites.” This sex narrative carries a dark metaphor of our zeitgeist, while emulating the obscenity level of certain social, economic and political events we are currently witnessing in Europe and North America. Sex served as a side dish for finances and politics or a naughty collateral for toxic mortgages. Under the light of consumerism the artist deploys a Theater of the Absurd, one in which everything fall in layers, with readily priced labels. Even the almost invisible references to explicit sex are grotesque in its synecdoche, the ad hoc attempt to retain an uncensored assertion: a big close up of a clit, a silo vulva resembling a meat cut, chicken breast transformed into chick breasts —with its product label stuck on them. All this fragmentation usurps their bodies; their humanity becomes a plain commodity, recycling pieces of advertising. The same applies to the use of text and graphic fonts through out the digital prints, in which López-Ramos pursuit a very ludicrous double meanings game. He recycles the pieces of real advertising into new symbolic dialogs, manipulates brands, rewrite slogans, or replace the contexts in which those slogans were conceived. The result is a chaotic new meaning surreptitiously interweaving the old text with new images.

Don’t Swallow Your Gum displays 14 digital collages and one original artwork, The Endless Pursuit of Cheese and Happiness (2013), an acrylic and collage on vinyl and corrugated cardboard, which connects this new endeavor with the rest of his Wonderland series. This painting embodies the contemporary cat and mouse game to achieve “cheese and happiness”, which bond together this exhibition’s prints. Some people might question the need to explore this topic using digital collage, rather than creating original ones, like he did before, but considering that he uses a photo editor software, the digital imagery highlights, at yet another conceptual level, the obscenity of the massive reproduction, controlled by an external entity –in this case, the artist usurping the role of a marketing company. While some of this artworks, such as, Bold Juicy Taste, Document Enclosed or Zarathustra, Confucius & Granny Say, might be considered obnoxious or grossly explicit, the artist have been straight. That may seem such a nonsensical idea, but Dadaism has entered into the new century as State Policy. Hence, this is not intended to be an obliging art but a shock therapy against the cultural and intellectual conformity, “emulating the obscene level” attained by reality. What this exhibition is about to show us is the art of eating the bait without getting hooked.

Joaquin Badajoz. The Roads, September 12th 2013.