I now feel this exhibition closes a circle.

It began with ‘Contracorriente’, a series of paintings where I question the body from the efforts that accompany it and sometimes exceed it. I relate to a humanity in pilgrimage, in search of a land where to dwell. Homes in transit that travel between porous borders, or flow through uncertain geographies facing the forces of nature. A journey where physical possessions are invariably carried, or where psychic and symbolic burdens are endured. ‘Contracorriente’ alludes to the stone that, with effort, Sisyphus carries uphill; to the weight of our own body, disputed by biological, psychic and social forces; to the objects that bind us to the world and the memories that protect us from oblivion.

In the series of paintings ‘Pacto’ and ‘Entre Orillas’, subsequent to ‘Contracorriente’, I continue to interrogate situations of exodus, but in these cases concentrating on the power of the bond, represented in human chains.
In the wandering of humanity from one territory to another, the present is there, where they move, but he past remains elsewhere. To overcome the fragility of this fragmentation and conquer a certain degree of strength, anonymous webs are formed where bodies, blurred in their identity yet connected to each other as human swarms, are transfigured into a mass, into a kind of common body that seeks to erase the boundary that separates inside from outside. The subjects become water, land, border, blending with the territory, since the movement that draws a body in space also shapes that body and, at the same time, affects that territory. Thus, body and territory overlap until they become intertwined.

Finally, with the series ‘Rima’, I refer to similarity, to repetition transcribed into a visual language, where images from the past are interrogated in the present. I think in the paradox of recurrence, of how events are repeated, reincarnated in other forms and installed in other contexts. In one case, I associate some panels of the universal emblem of violence against the civilian population, Picasso’s Guernica, with some photographs of the conflict in Colombia by the photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado.
In the series ‘Rima’, the dialogues I present and the images I gather, propose relationships that are not ordered through history, but appear as an emergence of the past in the present; a metaphor of many forgotten but somehow recurrent presents.

The works exhibited in ‘Travesías’ have a geographical component. They are places that cannot be perfectly defined or delimited, especially because they are irregular and marginal routes, a kind of nowhere through which migrants pass, and which do not generate identity or belonging. They are, one could say, geographical limbos located on the edge of heaven or hell.

The photographic and media images, testimony of the false and the true, are a reference throughout the series of paintings mentioned here, they are important sources of information that nourish me. I take images that arrive through the media and that impact me, I study them, question them, modify them, I look for my peers, and I produce, based on these images, my pictorial reflections.

I assume events and history as layers of meaning that come together to be looked at, contrasted, compared and distanced; in any case, as a constellation of references that allow me to re-signify the world I occupy.

Through the different forms of representation and pictorial surfaces, often imprecise, I can delve into the experience of the changing and elusive metaphor of a world in constant redefinition. In this form, the painted matter is testimonial and, in that sense, it is also an agent.

Martha Lucía Ramírez - September, 2024