Antonio Ramirez

       

 

If you were to ask me what came first in my personal experience—my criticism of the

society in which I live or my passion for painting—I would not know how to respond

accurately. When I was very young, still an adolescent, I entered in the world of painting

and, at the same time, passionately gave myself over to a relationship with persons and

situations that were questioning the state of things in the country and the world. From the

beginning, I felt that painting is a medium of statement, a language that could serve me

by explaining to me the world through the images and that, therefore, when you work in

the images with sincerity, our conception of the world goes implicitly and inseparably.

This is to say that our ideology remains formed there, independently of what this is.

been extremely meandering. In the beginning, in my years as a student at La Esmeralda

School of Painting, I used to paint what I was seeing, and what I was seeing was the life

full of the needs of a proletariat family to which I belonged. My gaze was so simple, like

it can be for a kid of 14 to 16 years of age, but I believe that I was pointing myself in the

right direction. Later, I took many different paths, giving a wider view to my eye and to

my hand. Like so many painters with leftist beliefs, I had to pay the high cost of the

pamphlet—this was in the seventies, times in which there was a rise of the worker

struggles in Mexico and a period in which my participation as an independent political

activist was intense. At that point, I began a process in my development in which I had to

struggle between being an illustrator of leftist political ideas and inserting my own artistic

contribution to the movement, starting with works that I had created without any dictates.

use of image as an expressive resource to question the oppressive reality in which the

underdogs lived. The collaborative painting of dozens of murals in the streets and alleys

of proletariat neighborhoods of Mexico City has been an experience that has left an

indelible mark on my work. I mingled my images with a great number of people who

weren't painters, but who, even if they didn't understand the technical aspects of

painting, had a much to say. Also,  the almost 15 years of participation in the Collective

Callejero has been something that confirms in a bruising manner the difficulty in

separating my passion for painting from my desire to subvert social reality with

difficulty. The outburst of the Zapatista movement in January 1994 returned my view

towards a rural and indigenous reality that, apart from its sharply questioning images, is

also full of a great poetic wealth.

( bio from Questions and Swords)

contact: (spanish) suepepo@yahoo.com  

                (english- care of Rebekah Meola )  RebMeola@aol.com