MARTÍN RAMÍREZ FOREVER

Like someone who walks into a maze and never finds his way out, when Ramírez left his country, he entered a lifelong and multifaceted exile. He worked in the mines and the railroads in Northern California during the ominous years preceding the Great Depression. He drew on the margins of his letters to Mexico. He was institutionalized under the presumption of manic-depression, and later catatonic dementia praecox and schizophrenia. Thereafter, he expressed himself through art and chose to never speak again.

Ramírez’s artistic vision seamlessly merges American vignettes—portrayals of an alienating urban landscape—with Mexican iconography elegantly extrapolated from memory. His assemblages and graphic mise-en-scènes: his Madonnas and mounted caballeros, his animals and trains—often framed within visually reverberating structures of shaded lineal iterations—are missives from a new and mysterious alternate world, where things are inextricably familiar and eerie. Art, in this case, seems to flourish from a profound sense of isolation, at the decisive point where representation fails to become life and must thus become something in its own right.

That Ramírez is among the great self-taught masters of the past century is, or should be, an indisputable statement. Equally true, is that the gargantuan artistic will expressed in the opus is the evidence of a tragic personal wreckage—of physical confinement, mental and cultural segregation. To a certain extent, it is unavoidable to incorporate the artist’s pathos into a reading of the artwork; these 400 plus drawings are, after all, Ramírez’s self-crafted redemption. All great art—whether labeled Outsider or otherwise—should, however, pay homage to the particularity of the creator’s circumstance and at the same time transcend it.

The discussion around the dichotomy of mainstream art vis-à-vis what falls “outside” and its questionable legitimacy is by now well worn. While a set of forever postage stamps dedicated to an artist like Ramírez is certainly one more instance in which the separation can be deemed obsolete (is there, after all, anything more mainstream than a stamp?), what is truly remarkable about this commemorative gesture is something broader. Ramírez was a creative giant, yes, but he was also a Mexican outcast in the United States who lived in the uttermost fringe of society. By choosing to honor his life and work; by including him in the league of personages worthy of such officially endorsed recognition, one of the oldest American institutions is demonstrating that the artificial inside/outside paradigm speaks of how we think about national and cultural frontiers—well beyond the realm of art.

In Ramírez’s work, there is a compulsion to grasp and encapsulate empty space, a deep concern with physical and mental boundaries. If we indulge in a little imaginative thinking, we could ponder on how this suggests that borders and dividing lines, of any kind, are arbitrary and contingent—the first cartographers must have been great draftsmen, like Ramírez himself—and what this might imply. In any case, what the Ramírez example (and the radical shift of his standing in American society) brings to the forefront, is that culture and creativity are fluid, non-compartmentalized things; that exceptional art is born from intimate needs and specific historical contexts, but that it resonates with the human condition at large. If life becomes art to make up for its shortcomings, it is only in the best of cases that, once transformed, it gets to become life again. Today, in the form of a compact and historic set of stamps, parts of Ramírez’s art will enter into the flux of life and travel freely into the collective imagination.