Osvaldo Ramirez Commentary

The Drawers - Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo Commentary written by Zachari Logan

exhibitions in the drawers in the gallery commentaries artists catalogs contact

Inde-Picks (Independent Curator's Selection)

With a sensuous and menacing propinquity, the work of Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo at once arrests, pulling the viewer into a nightmarish story filled with phantasmagoric monsters and iconic images of popular, political and religious figures, elicited through a sequence of fragmented memories. In a way cinematic, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, these drawings also invoke references to both Francisco Goya's Disasters of War etchings and his Black Paintings along with other historic political works, such as, Theodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. Like the works of these great artists, Castillo draws on themes of psychosis, suffering and mortality in states of flux, illustrated on paper as personal and collective recountings.

Castillo's Drawings are consummately drafted, unflinchingly visceral sites of personal identity and history, a history lived defiant of sterile versions that have been politically endorsed. Each character has been hauntingly realized, a part of the narrative whether in a state of grotesque majesty or tragic subjection adding to the creation of a mythic landscape. The dissemination of chaos in these drawings exposes the clumsiness and utter depravity with which lived experiences intersect and inform the world around us. The myriad of creatures and mutations of bodies both trussed and in a state of violent domination transfix a notion of evolution wrought out of pain and loss. These masterfully constructed renderings act as psychic stage-sets, sites of confrontation with the past, and are brave acts of remembering.