DAVID RICHARD CONTEMPORARY

DAVID RICHARD CONTEMPORARY
Solo exhibition by Paul Henry Ramirez, June 11 through July 17, 2010

Excerpt from the artist catalog:

Paul Henry Ramirez: Abstraction’s Omnivore
by Nancy Princenthal

If the rigor of Ramirez’s process is evident in its results, so is an exceptionally mischievous visual imagination. In a recent series called “Chunk,” much of the white space that once dominated his canvasses has been taken over by irregular but rectilinear fields of brown and black. His long experience integrating paintings into architectural contexts has contributed, Ramirez notes, to the geometrization of his vocabulary, but he also says the brown and black forms are anthropomorphic. With that permission, it is possible to see a kinship between these highly abstracted figures and Scott Burton’s late quasi-figurative, crypto-homoerotic chairs and benches, which have a similarly straight-edged stylization. Flowering between the dark right-angled dominant forms in the “Chunk” paintings are dazzling bouquets of breastlike blooms painted in birthday-party varieties of blue, red, pink, lavender and yellow, plus one or two in fleshy shades of pink. Each sunny orb is topped with a smaller circle in a contrasting color: a cheerful little nipple. All are tethered to the canvasses’ edges by lines that draw them into teardrops, and make them slightly resemble balloons—buoyant, helium-filled ones when they tug upward on their strings, swollen water balloons when they droop. As the lines gather between the viselike grip of the black and brown shapes, they form dazzling, narrowly ruled stripes. Ironically reductive representations of gender and race viewed from one perspective, the “Chunk” paintings are irresistible formal inventions seen from another—and fully engrossing in either case.