NARANJO 141 is pleased to present A Diestra y Siniestra, a presentation of new paintings and sculptures by Mexico City-born, Düsseldorf-based artist Fabian Ramírez (b.1994).

While living with the Hach Winik people in the Lacandon Jungle, Fabian Ramírez studied their burnt ceramics technique and took part in shamanic copal rituals. The experience put him in touch with the Maya concept of duality, in which the individual can only achieve harmony with the outside world by discovering it within themself. When he left Chiapas to return to Germany, Ramírez faced the challenge of finding unity in his identity as both a Mexican with pre-Hispanic roots and an artist trained in the academic Western style of painting. He sensed in this duality an opportunity for growth, “not only in terms of building language,” he says, “but in a personal way.”

Born out of a desire to meld indigenous wisdom with Western thought, the work spanning A Diestra y Siniestra records moments of revelation that resist easy categorization. Flourishing abstract brushwork first greets the viewer, but then incongruous elements begin to emerge: an outstretched hand, a hint of a Doric column, a glimpse of a face in the grips of awe. References to Mayan symbology are scattered among invocations of Greek myth, and ancient ritual visions find form in the language of contemporary abstraction. In this uncertain visual field, where the eye cannot easily rest in representation or abstraction, and seemingly contradictory historical canons coexist, the kernel of a universal visual language begins to form.

In the materiality of his work, Ramírez’s experimental use of wood, flame and encaustic manages to maintain a unity of opposites. Fire, an element typically perceived as destructive, is applied to the panels to enhance the wood grains of the ground. New life surfaces, and a balance between construction and destruction is revealed. Encaustic, a medium pioneered and used historically by Western painters, can be traced back to the Mexican muralists who did not have access to the European resin elemi at the time, but instead mixed their own with copal—the incense used traditionally, and still currently, in the Mexican practice of ritual. Through the application of the medium itself, Ramírez activates a spirituality latent in the Western canon of art, and heightens the poetic effect of two identities converging in harmony together.

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