“I’m from the south”, as a song written there says, so I see everything from the south, even if I live in the north. My job is to create visions, worlds that lead the poetic and political imaginary to a common place among them. I come from a world surrounded by the mountain range on one side, and the other bathed along the sea. When I think of a work I think about the time of massive migrations, the apparent collapse of distances by instantaneous communication and the vortex of images in which we live.

It is perhaps this paradox-the fact that the traveler’s absence does not erase his presence-that explains the importance of the sublime in the relationship between the sea, travel and visions. I am an artist who believes that the speed of walking or boarding a sailboat is the real speed in this world. I am an artist who wants works to heal, cry, breathe, makes people think. I am an artist who seeks to take risks in my work, as in life itself.

When I build an image, I think what is not seen of it, in the off-screen, what is behind the wall, inside a mask. Everything that will make sense only if you try to imagine; where poetry meets a real image; where an ocean is on the precipice of the real horizon. There, too, the spectator who faces my images can feel inside their own reality and bring their own experience to travel through my stories. That is why I believe visions, because history does not want sea, history wants certainty and answers. For the answers, art does not exist, but to ask questions, to pose ideas, to see the world from another place.

Enrique Ramírez - Paris, November 2016

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Enrique Ramírez was born in 1979 in Santiago de Chile. Since 2010, he lives and works between Paris (France) and Santiago (Chile). He studied popular music and cinema in Chile before joining the postgraduate master in contemporary art and new media of Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France). In 2014 he won the discovery price of Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. He has since exposed in some major places as Le Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton or le 104, France (le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire) and in Central and South America (Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico; Museo de la memoria, Santiago; Centro Cultural MATTA, Embajada de Chile en Argentina, Buenos Aires). In 2017, he was invited to the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia curated by Christine Macel.

Enrique Ramírez’s work combines video, photography, installations and poetic narratives. Ramírez appreciates stories within stories, fictions straddling countries and epochs, the mirages between dream and reality. This Chilean artist, who lives and works between Chile and France, often uses image and sound to construct a profusion of intrigues and to occupy the equilibrium between the poetic and the political. His imaginary worlds are attached to one obsessional element—his thinking starts with the sea, a space for memory in perpetual movement, a space for narrative projections where the fate of Chile intersects with grand narratives of voyage, conquest and migratory flows. His liquid images speak of the sparkle of a truth in permanent flight, the backwash of history, always repeating and never the same.

He is represented by the gallery Michel Rein (Paris/Brussels) and Die Ecke (Santiago).