Thierry Goldberg is pleased to present MUSA
X PARADISIACA, Bony Ramirez’s first in-person solo exhibition with the gallery,
following his online solo exhibition this spring, Grass Under The Wood. The
exhibition will run from November 7th through December 20th,
2020.
In MUSA X PARADISIACA, Bony Ramirez fuses
together Caribbean iconography and Renaissance styles to create works that
reflect on the colonialist history and contemporary sentiments of The Dominican
Republic: the artist’s home until age 13.
Unique
in his painting practice, Ramirez combines paintings and drawings by adhering
life-size paper figures onto painted wood panels, creating layered works where
figures blend into their backgrounds. The subjects of these portraits are bold
and strange, yet eerily seductive; characterized by oversized and mysteriously
contorted hands and feet; ears filled with rainbow swirls; and large, wide,
doll-like eyes. Behind Ramirez’s muses (musa)
lie saturated, playful colors, or landscapes of quintessential Caribbean beaches,
jungles, and symbols of paradise (paraíso).
Accompanying many of his subjects are Caribbean still lifes with Caribbean
fruits, shells, and plants like the “flamboyant
tree” and plantains (scientifically, Musa x paradisiaca). Ramirez uses the
traditional elements of Renaissance portraiture, but adapts them with Caribbean
iconography, rendering his works’ subject matter away from white gentry to
those affected by European colonialism.
The
works in MUSA X PARADISIACA are divided into reflections on the past and present: the
main level of the gallery is filled with works representing contemporary Dominican
figures, and the works downstairs, tell the story of the tumultuous history of the
country. Throughout both levels of the gallery, Ramirez’s drawn figures come to
life as three toddler-size sculptures of children, each possessing the same
physical features as the artist’s drawn figures.
The
nine paintings upstairs depict present-day Dominican life while meditating on
the history of the country’s past. In these works
Ramirez experiments with the background behind his subjects, veering away from the
conventions of traditional portraiture to contemporary influences like abstracted
tropical forests, shapes, and animations. Though more modern in their
portrayals, these figures still carry with them the history of their ancestors on
the island of Hispaniola (the island of Haiti and The Dominican Republic).
Through
five paintings downstairs, Ramirez recounts the history of the colonization,
slavery, and fight for sovereignty in The Dominican Republic. His retelling
begins with the indigenous people, the Taíno, in Musa X Paradisiaca (2020), where he portrays a Taíno
woman with Dominican plants wrapped in her arms. Like
in Renaissance portraiture, where the sitter is surrounded by symbols representing
an intimate detail of their personal story, here, Ramirez places the Taíno woman with symbols of her culture,
signifying the history of the Taíno before the Spanish colonization. Ramirez
reflects the fraught arrival of the Spanish in La Mentira/ The Lie (2020), where he shows a Spanish woman crossing
her fingers in hopes of her country’s triumph over Hispaniola and the region. Following
this work, Ramirez’s third work in the series, The Feast, Plantain and Fish (2020), portrays a Taíno woman next to
a West African woman, alluding to the Spanish’s enslavement of both populations.No Fue El Final/ It Was Not The End(2020), the penultimate work of the five, shows the gruesome
rebellions against the Spanish in which a Spanish woman is slashed along her neck, bleeding, and perhaps
soon to be decapitated. And finally, in Ramirez’s last work in this historical
retelling, he personifies the Dominican’s reclamation of power after their declaration
of independence from the Spanish. In Dónde Están Los Limóncillos? (2020), a Dominican woman uses her beauty to assert her dominance over a white man who
leans towards her, yearning for the Limóncillos, (Spanish Limes) in
her hand, only to be pulled away.
Though Ramirez
has divided his works by time period, the confrontations with the region’s history
are shared between them. Accordingly, his works insist that the past exists in
the present more than meets our eye.
Ramirez’s works show a new side of portraiture, one that tells not of
those that wrote history, but those who have been continuously left out of it –
allowing us to critically examine his subjects in order to gain a new
perspective.
The gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm. For more information please email or call
the gallery at + 1. 212.228.7569 or info@thierrygoldberg.com