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Being Seriously Playful at UTEP
With its brand new multimillion dollar visual arts center, UTEP has created an extraordinary opportunity to showcase contemporary artists of national importance, and to create an exciting dialogue between artists, students and the larger community.
Created with matching funds from the Houston endowment, the Brown foundation and the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin foundation, The Center has 3 galleries a lecture auditorium, and an ambitious plan for bringing important contemporary artwork and artists to El Paso.
The Center is focusing on contemporary arts precisely so that, as the innovative gallery director Kate Boninsinga says, “artists can come and interact with students and the community.” This will be through lectures as well as involving students in various installations. For example even before the Center opened, Korean born, New York based artist Sook Jin Jo created a free standing installation entitled Wishing Worlds. She asked students to gather objects from El Paso and Juarez representing their wishes for world peace to hang on the form. Over time different objects will be hung so the installation will be ever-changing.
If you are going to open a beautiful new arts center, you might as well have fun doing it, and Kate Bonansinga chose the exuberant El Paso born, New York based artist Paul Henry Ramirez to inaugurate the new Center with a show entitled ‘Seriously Playful”.
Ramirez attended UTEP from 1986-1987, moved to New York in 1991, and has gained national and international recognition for his work. Although he began his themes at various galleries in New York, his first major one-man show was at Caren Golden Fine Art in New York in 1997. He then went on to the Aldrich museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Since then he has shown on both coasts, at Diverseworks, at the Whitney and this past month at Mary Boone gallery as well as his current installation at UTEP.
In an interview with Ian Berry for his Elevatious Transcendualistic show at Skidmore College, he indiucates his concerns with accentuating the internal/external male/female body combinations and his interest in spontaneous and fluid movement.
He also points out that “I have been working with visual merchandising for most of my adult life so it has had an effect on my work as an artist, I don’t think that I ever consciously incorporated retail design work, but a lot of skills do overlap. Display work deals with presentation, transforming space and the consideration of the viewer’s response. It has trained my eye to clearly visualize how something will look before actually implementing a project.”
He also is extremely particular about his surfaces and lines, going over each line eight times, and using nine layers of gesso and sand to get the surface sufficiently smooth.
“Seriously Playful” includes works ranging from 1995 to the present but demonstrates a coherent vision of movement and play. For the exhibit, the walls were painted with the same bright pinks, blues and green cartoon like colors and with many of the same forms found on the individual pieces so the large room comes alive with movement.
The viewer moves from the works to the walls and back circling the room with a free interaction between the two surfaces, engulfed in this exploration of shapes and forms.
Ramirez' images are for the most part overtly sexual in their imagery , attenuated hair, breasts and genitalia, though many are simply geometric shapes moving into each other, penetrating, squirting on, interacting in ways which seem playful, almost like stills from a slightly demented animated cartoon.
Along one wall there are enormously long sheets of paper on which are elegant attenuated swirls referencing hair and body parts , along the other walls are pieces from various series such as the Space Addiction series, the Elevations Transcendualistic Series as well as others, but seen together they blend seamlessly into a bright joyful arena. This is a room that just wants to have fun.
The installation also includes sculpture, some furniture and a soundtrack composed by Ramirez with So Takahashi. This minimalist audio is perhaps the serious part of the fun. It is beautiful and haunting, but I’m not sure how it fits with the sloshing and flowing, drawing up and extending out going on all over the walls and the canvas.
Seriously Playful: Paul Henry Ramirez 1995-2004. Sept. 23-Dec 4 2004
Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso. (915) 747-6151.
Ian Berry Paul Henry Ramirez Elevatious Transcendualistic (Tang Teaching Museum Art Gallery Skidmore College.)