Edgar Ramirez

Edgar Ramirez lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, he’s been an L.A. native for 33 years. He received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, in 2020, and his BFA, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles in 2018. His most recent projects include a solo presentation at Frieze, Los Angeles (2023) with Chris Sharp Gallery and a solo exhibition at Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). His work has been featured in group exhibitions most recently, at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2022)The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2022), Show Gallery, as part of his residency at Quinn Emanuel Artists-in-Residence, Los Angeles (2022), as well as a solo presentation at NADA, Miami with Chris Sharp Gallery (2021).

Drawing on his immediate urban environment, certain pockets of art history, and post-Fordist philosophy, Edgar Ramirez is an atypical painter. The subject matter of his work is inspired by anonymous signs— “We Buy Houses, Fix Your Credit,” etc.—that parasitically populate low-income neighborhoods all over Los Angeles and America. Appropriating the look and language of these predatory signs, he paints them in a multitude of colors on cardboard and then subjects them to a process of aggressive subtraction which seems to exist somewhere between classical décollage and urban decay. The resultant images are variously reminiscent of Nouveau Realism, the work of Los Angeles native, Mark Bradford, and Abstract Expressionism.

However, differing from his forebears, the exploitative specificity of the subject matter directly informs the formal decisions that Ramirez makes. The subtractive aspect of the work becomes analogous to the negativity of debt as a positive ontological feature of the contemporary human subject. You are by virtue not of what you have, but by what you don’t have, or rather, owe.

By a similar twist of negative logic, these paintings could also be situated within a landscape tradition through their invocation of the harried urban fabric from which they issue. To Clyfford Still’s vast romantic conjurations of the American west, Ramirez responds with a symbolic horizon which is altogether more damaged, anarchic and violent. For all their riotous energy, these paintings respond to a landscape that arguably takes more than it gives. Nevertheless, the palpable texture, richness, and color of Ramirez’s paintings are characterized by a strident and explosive beauty, as if in protest and in spite of everything.