BEAUTY REIGNS 2014 McNay Art Museum
BEAUTY REIGNS 2014 McNay Art Museum
Paul Henry Ramirez site-specific installation, ECCENTRIC STIMULI, at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio TX, 2014. Commissioned by the McNay Art Museum, the installation is part of a group exhibition entitled Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, organized by René Paul Barilleaux, the McNay’s Chief Curator/Curator of Art after 1945.
Exhibition catalogue Beauty Reigns A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting: Here’s Looking at You, June, 2014, by Lilly Wei
Paul Henry Ramirez, currently living in New Jersey, is perhaps best known for his site-specific installations, transforming a room or a gallery into an enchanted realm. His version of the baroque appropriates architectural structure and real space as a theater for his exuberant, partly abstract, partly figurative wall paintings. His candy-colored biomorphic shapes accompanied by fine-line filigree and flourishes trumpet their resemblance to male and female body parts. Their cheeky adolescent eroticism alternates between titillating and more abstract readings that owe much to modernist geometries, mid-century graphics, Color Field and Pop Art in which a circle is indeed also a breast. A formalist and designer, Ramirez jauntily walks the precarious line between disciplines, expertly balancing the serious and the playful, his hijinks a pleasure to behold.
Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum, photo by Michael Jay Smith.
Paul Henry Ramirez site-specific installation, ECCENTRIC STIMULI, at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio TX, 2014. Commissioned by the McNay Art Museum, the installation is part of a group exhibition entitled Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, organized by René Paul Barilleaux, the McNay’s Chief Curator/Curator of Art after 1945.
Exhibition catalogue Beauty Reigns A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting: Here’s Looking at You, June, 2014, by Lilly Wei
Paul Henry Ramirez, currently living in New Jersey, is perhaps best known for his site-specific installations, transforming a room or a gallery into an enchanted realm. His version of the baroque appropriates architectural structure and real space as a theater for his exuberant, partly abstract, partly figurative wall paintings. His candy-colored biomorphic shapes accompanied by fine-line filigree and flourishes trumpet their resemblance to male and female body parts. Their cheeky adolescent eroticism alternates between titillating and more abstract readings that owe much to modernist geometries, mid-century graphics, Color Field and Pop Art in which a circle is indeed also a breast. A formalist and designer, Ramirez jauntily walks the precarious line between disciplines, expertly balancing the serious and the playful, his hijinks a pleasure to behold.
Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum, photo by Michael Jay Smith.