ZONA MACO 2025

Rodrigo Ramírez

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of Rodrigo Ramírez in this year's edition of Zona Maco. The immersive booth, which includes nine linked paintings that create a hyperintense experience, represent the nine layers of the infraworld as showcased by Pre-Hispanic cultures in Mesoamerica. The paintings of Ramírez depict the human body's struggle to contain the magmatic psychological energy within the boundaries of a crystalized identity. Deformed, torn, and in a perennial languishing status, they become alien to themselves, unable to reconcile the eternal conflict of minds and bodies. The matter-bodies embrace this conflict and produce endless possibilities of body representation, constantly deconstructing and destroying forms, limbs, and body boundaries. This perennial dichotomy between pleasure and pain animating our deeper desires is a liminal viscosity in which subjectivity disappears as the individual becomes alien to himself but free from painful conflict. 

February 5th - February 9th, 2025

Centro Citibanamex, Mexico City

The artist presents an interconnectedness between the idea of the “other” in a decolonial world and how it relates to the cannibalism of culture as a way of strength. Ramírez’s work can be understood through this decolonial lens, as he depicts the human body's struggle to contain the magmatic psychological energy within the boundaries of a crystalized identity. Through flesh colored, anthropomorphic bodies that shake spasmodically, agitated by an inner conflict. Ramirez immerses the viewer into a shift, sort of purgatory, considering the colors as active agents that create multiplicity. Inspired by the poetry of William Blake and overlapped with the symbolism of Oswald de Andrade’s “The Manifesto Antropófago”, Rodriguez immerses the viewer in tension between lightness and darkness, pronounced from Blake’s writings of siding with the devils rather than the angels, and that the creations of poets and artists are to challenge and transform the world. As Blake said, “each person reflects the contrary nature of God, and that progression in life is impossible without contraries. The power of embracing contradiction to achieve harmony.”

Through Andrade’s introspection, creatives must interact with the ideal of cannibalizing other cultures to adhere to a higher way of life. Rodriguez presents inspirations of this allegory within the viscosity and incarnating bodies in constant transition, where the matter spasms against unseen forces, engaging with different abstract forms. These ideas inevitably lead to both Ramirez’s political and aesthetic perspectives, the works are composed through a dislocation that goes beyond the idea of ​​present and identity questioning the notions of gender, race, sexuality or nationality, allowing the indiscernibility of ideas such as ​​being Mexican, being human/non-human or even the organic-inorganic differentiation. A machine-cyborg-extended body of the earth-alien-miscegenation. “I am another; is my affection metallic or it is the affection of the earth that overflows what I know about myself until it becomes pure intensity, uncertainty and vertigo?” The result is a kind of production machine of undifferentiation, a potentiation of the false that, unlike the insensitive flows of the accelerated machine of capital, tries to embody molecular, haptic and tactile sensitivity from the concept of anthropophagy. 

If one looks to history, we can conceive that every structure and society in the end eats itself alive, seemingly from the inside out, in Ramirez’s pictures they hold the beginnings of this phenomenon. In our current era, their beautiful violence resonates as one feels the formerly stated verge, they could be read as a caterpillar emerging out of its cocoon, or contrarily a straight-jacketed living sack of flesh writhing in anguish. Devouring everything, feeling everything, spilling nerves that explode and petrify on surfaces. Desire, the violence of exploitation, toxic environmental hells and cybernetic circuits are configured as if on an immanent and libidinal surface. 

“A wound is also an opening in which the landscape becomes indifferent to the body, the dream to wakefulness. I don't know where I end up.”