PLAYCONICS
Galerie Richard, New York, NY
2011

Acrobatic/Erotic Abstraction: Paul Henry Ramirez’s PLAYCONICS by Donald Kuspit

I like to think of Paul Henry Ramirez as a trapeze artist, an acrobat sailing through space on a wildly constructed abstract swing, making his daring act all the more thrilling. I love to watch solo performers, moving through space with cunning ease, using their wits to outwit the Icarian odds against them, to fly without falling, courting chance and danger, skillfully mastering them. Their death-defying risk-taking act gives the audience—that’s me—the thrill of a lifetime. Ramirez is an important new kind of abstract painter—not your old-time transcendentalist (however “transcendental” it is to fly through space), but a playful abstractionist, that is, an abstractionist playing with color and form to exciting imaginative effect, rather than, as in traditional abstraction, presenting them for their own pure selves, whatever spiritual effect they may have. Not that Ramirez’s abstractions aren’t uplifting, but that they’re also disconcerting. He’s not one-dimensionally geometrical (cool and aloof) or non-geometrical (hot and intense), to use and qualify Alfred Barr’s distinguished old terms, but finds the curvilinear geometry in organic gestures, as his so-called “waving hairs” and “flying squirts”—hot and cool at the same time--show. They’re geometrically exact yet seem spontaneously drawn, erotically allude to the body however disembodied they seem. He gives complete circles—some enormous, others tiny--expressive outreach by way of his blatant colors: luminous oranges and yellows, intense reds and blacks, opposites often dramatically paired in an unresolved contrast, making for an invigorating, if unnerving, tension and excitement. And perhaps above all by way of his seductive pink, provocative and poignant at once because of its symbolic import.

Abstraction has become old and secure in its old age, the darling of the avant-garde establishment, resting on its laurels of spiritual seriousness, becoming complacently autonomous and superior, the officially great innovation of twentieth century art. But, as Mark Rosenthal writes in his magisterial study of Abstraction in the Twentieth Century, it has become “an art about Nothing,” and as such “boring.” Its fundamentals—“spontaneous gesture, geometric composition, iconic forms, and monochromes”—have remained unchanged since they were first formulated. After a century of wear and tear they have become stale and trite. As Rosenthal says, abstract art is no longer revolutionary, innovative, risky. It has become a “formal exercise,” but it no longer takes formal risks. Nor does it take emotional risks.

Ramirez takes both. He’s formally and expressively inventive. He uses monochromatic geomorphic forms to build bizarrely biomorphic figures—“iconic” fantasy figures, all the more ingeniously “surreal” because they are absurdly (mis)shaped. Planar fragments, geometrically and chromatically incommensurate, are (dis)organized in eccentric abstractions. And absurdly sexual: testicular forms, often heart-shaped, swing in space, suspended on long rope-like gestures. Intriguingly, some are capped by egg-like, oval shapes, suggestive of nipples. The testicles become breasts, the breasts become testicles. And there are many breasts, suggesting an abstract, symbolic version of Diana of Ephesus, the forty-breasted Magna Mater (who had bull’s testicles for breasts). The extremes marry, deliriously proliferating, even as they maintain their difference, dervishing in their own vibrancy.

It’s a playful metaphor, reminding us of the psychic bisexuality of all human beings, acknowledged since antiquity and emphasized by Freud, and physically conveyed by the fact that all human beings have certain similar features, however differently formed and sized: both men and women have nipples, the penis and clitoris are equally excitable, and the testicles and womb contain the seeds of life. Biology tells us that they are initially undifferentiated in the embryo, finally differentiating under hormonal and genetic “pressure.” The hermaphroditic flowers in Gorky’s Garden of Sochi paintings make the same point, but they’re much more morbid and sinister than Ramirez’s hermaphroditic forms, which seem comic and good-humored, as though suggesting that nature has played a sexual joke on all of us. My point is that Ramirez has the same ironically realistic vision of the human sexual condition as the comic playwright Aristophanes had: we all begin as hermaphrodites until we are split in two by the gods, for to be hermaphroditic was to be as great as the gods, and thus a threat to them. Aristophanes argued that sexual desire involves the eternal urge to re-unite—sometimes man with woman, sometimes man with man, sometimes woman with woman, depending on the character of the original split. I think that Ramirez offers us, by way of his deceptively simple testicular/breast form, a sort of dream condensation of male and female attributes. They unite in the heart; the fountain-like “discharges” and hair-like curlicues are also heart-shaped—streamlined hearts gushing and throbbing with pleasure, made all the more uncannily lurid and titillating because they are so well and abstractly formed, so meticulously and eloquently rendered. To better describe his abstract images, Ramirez has coined the term "biogeomorphic abstraction" but I think geometry serves biology in them. His figures are abstract hermaphrodites, their sexual attributes geometrically idealized and perfected, making them all the more seductive.

Since 1995, Ramirez has been pushing the boundaries of canvas painting and the way in which the audience experiences it, as the Newark Museum installation makes clear. The architectural space becomes an extension of the canvas paintings and the canvas paintings become part of the architecture. For this exhibition there are two such site-specific wall installations, which invite the viewer to physically experience a oneness with the work. They do not have the “hermeticism” that Rosenthal criticized, arguing that it made abstraction “unapproachable,” but invite us into their space, and the space in which they participate, enlivening and dramatizing it. We cannot help but interact with Ramirez’s works, not only because they are sensuously exciting and sensually provocative, but because we are permitted to handle them—break the traditional barrier between the viewer and the work. S/he is sometimes invited to rotate them, in effect re-composing them, making them all the more acrobatically complex, bringing out their multidimensional meaning and aesthetics (there are three such interactive “TIPSY” works, as Ramirez calls them, in the exhibition). The viewer becomes a creative participant in the work rather than an outside observer. One is reminded of Greenberg’s idea that an abstract work should look good from every side and angle, and surprise us from every side, and thus “exhilarate”—his word—the viewer, which Ramirez’s acrobatic works certainly do.

Looking at Ramirez’s erotic abstractions, I was reminded (no doubt in an all too free association) of some of the rooms of Pompeii, where flying penises—a good luck charm in Roman antiquity—ornament the walls. Ramirez’s heart-shaped testicular/breasts are also ornamental, and also, I venture to say, good luck charms—amulets warding off the evil eye with their “double vision.” Other walls show ritualized sexual activity, adding to the Dionysian decoration. The ornamentally decorative has been said to be feminine, but both the ancient Dionysian imagery and Ramirez’s Dionysian abstraction have the aggressive in-your-face directness associated with masculinity.

The larger point is that Ramirez’s abstractions belong in the tradition of what Markus Brüderlin has called ornamental abstraction—abstraction which, however decorative, uses the sensuous to sublime effect, making it thrilling, all the more so because, as theorists of the sublime from Longinus to Burke have said, the sublime brings with it a sense of hovering in immeasurable space—the pure white plane of space in which Ramirez’s erotogenic forms are embedded and suspended, and which sometimes almost takes over the work, suggesting that the forms are pure however perverse. One is in a “philobatic state” when one is in sublime space, adventuring in the beyond,“on one’s own, relying on one’s own resources,” as Michael Balint says, enjoying the insecurity, the lack of safety and stability. “Clinging to objects or part objects,” such as the genitals or breasts, one is an “ocnophilic state of security.”(2) Remarkably, Ramirez is able to be in a philobatic state and ocnophilic state simultaneously, indeed, to fuse them—a rare expressive feat. To give the body’s sexual parts abstract form may be a way of modestly veiling them, but in Ramirez’s abstraction it seems to make them more sublime.

Notes
(1)Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996), 236
(2)Michal Balint, Thrills and Regressions (London: Maresfield Library, 1987), 26