Rodrigo Ramírez Rodríguez

While Being Plasmic Membranes

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition of Rodrigo Ramirez R featuring a new series of paintings, sculpture, and installation. Rodrigo Ramirez’s portrayal of the existential experience manifests in the limbo of a purgatory space: gripping with the unsettling dialectic tension between flesh and psyche, tending to exceed the limits of both the body and mind to break in other notions of its limits.

March 29th - April 26th, 2025

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

The work of Ramirez moves beyond the logic of sensation and the violence of the subconscious, erupting into a sensorial reality to become an image and a symbol. His foreboding figures manifest confused and convulsed on canvas in this dynamic space of potential continuous transformation, where fluid sensations can dictate the rhythm of endless possibilities of morphing and transformation into new entities following the perpetual flow of matter and energy in constant motion. 

For Ramirez, the space of the canvas becomes both a stage, a membrane and a cage for the boundless interplay between embodiment and disembodiment: his plasmic membranes evoke the same experience of connection and disconnection between our interdependent physical and digital experience of the world while suggesting this fluid reality between being and experiencing. In this way, the paintings employ a deeply cinematic essence, as if some sort of drama is progressively unfolding on the canvas under the viewer’s gaze. Each of his visceral brushstrokes serves as a visual cue, introducing the viewer to a moment of heightened tension, a climax of sensations between extreme pain and pleasure that spark the vital energy of a pulse. There is a characterization of a Baroque vertigo, one which pulls the viewer into a swirling, extremely dramatic interplay of light and dark hues, conveying a dizzying sense of movement and instability within the contrasting duality of forces.

At once, as in film, the fluid dimension of these images suggests the possibility of something in perpetual media res, something that continues to evolve, transform and grow out of the primordial gene in a free collaboration between intuition, revisitation of historical tropes and imagination free of reins—a liquid dance between different possible states of being or evolution in continuous metamorphosis. 

As Gilles Deleuze suggested, there are two ways to overcome figuration (meaning both the illustrative and the narrative). This is either in the direction of the abstract form or towards the “figure,” conceived simultaneously as a single nuclear entity of sensitive form and emotional and psychical experience. The existential experience is made of flesh and the subject's nervous system and of the “object’ as a fact, place and event. The images conceived by Ramirez appear both devoured and regurgitated by the realm of representation, as secretion resting between the realm of a canvas or a screen as they outgrow beyond the space they allow. 

Ultimately, his works attempt to manifest an ontological representation of this notion of the self, presented simultaneously in its bodily and physical dimensions, becoming plastic and intersectional membranes where the conflict of the self can move between different available layers and dimensions of representation, between its physical and virtual experience, between the sensual brushstrokes and the digital like quality of these hybrid images. Optics elements, screens and projection recently introduced in his sculptures become instrumental for Ramirez in intentionally distorting, manipulating and fluidly mutating the figure to suggest the idea of a self that is “becoming” in the sensation and “happening”  through it, echoing Deleuze again.

For this reason, all the entities conceived by Ramirez appear as hybrids, suggesting a fluid notion of the body that can constantly blend and incorporate different elements while simultaneously being an anamorphic presence that can continually mutate depending on the perspective, device, and context in which it will manifest its essence. It’s “matter of fact” in opposition to its “matter of being.” Moving within the dynamic nexus between physical and psychical experience, between real and projection, between particles and pixels, Ramirez offers a bewildering representation of the human body that appears at once timely and progressive, as an ominous symbolic representation of a state of being, thinking and existing in the complicated multilayered dimension of reality we are immersed in in today’s world.