Untitled Art | Miami Beach
Ocean Drive and 12th Street
Miami Beach, Florida

Booth B44

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Tuesday, 3 Dec 10am-7pm

Open Hours:
Wed, 4 Dec 11am - 7pm
Thurs, 5 Dec 11am - 7pm
Fri, 6 Dec 11am - 7pm
Sat, 7 Dec 11am - 7pm
Sun, 8 Dec 11am - 5pm

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smoke the moon enthusiastically presents a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles multidisciplinary artist, Javier Ramirez. Born and raised in LA’s San Fernando Valley, the artist has honed a visual codex brimming with a material playfulness and poignancy. Ramirez’s work mythologizes the people and streets of the neighborhoods that raised him. Working deftly across painting and sculpture, the artist creates scenes that fabulate on the beauty of daily labors and objects. There is a raucous and technically precise revelry to Ramirez’s work; a universe brimming with life’s surreal beauty.

The greater Los Angeles area is bounded by overlapping cultural histories, tensions and exchanges. Raised in a Mexican-American household, Ramirez is a first generation Angeleno keenly interested in playing with the edges of bifurcated and malleable identity formation. His paintings emerge sun drenched in a liminal state, teasing out the hazy border between here and there. The artist’s work embodies the pliable nature of cultural identity, community formation and relational aesthetics. There is a mischievous nod to much of Ramirez’s accumulated symbology; fonts lifted from sidewalk graffiti splash across canvases stippled with romantic airbrushed renderings of animals of childhood fantasy and household trinkets. Javier paints as if he’s inviting you into his own backyard oasis: each object elevated to a zone of affectionate intimacy, becoming deities of the everyday. 

This body of work has been heavily influenced by Ramirez’s relationship to corridos. Corridos are a Mexican balladic song form that are sung in the service of narrative metric tales. The corrido is an urgent form, stemming all the way back to its origins in the Mexican War of Independence and continuing as a vital form of information throughout the Mexican Revolution. Until the proliferation of electronic mass media, the corrido served as a primary method of education and radicalization for the masses. They’ve had a renaissance in the 21st century, and contemporary corridos revolve around modern expressions of life on the margins. Epics of drug trafficking, immigration, migrant labor and folk creatures weave through the stories of today’s corridos. Ramirez’s paintings take on both the insurgent energy and romantic vantage of corridos. The name of the genre comes from the spanish correr, meaning to run. Across the songs and Ramirez’s work there is a drive toward movement, an undercurrent of energy that everything is being buoyed by and through. 

Painting is a way of keeping record for Ramirez. He talks about his canvases the same way someone would describe keeping a journal. He begins without a filter, the same way one approaches automatic writing or shopping lists. The task is to stay with the present; to have an immediate outlet for his interest and idea at a particular moment. Ramirez has an urgent presence; his work is a painterly run through the objects and figures of the psyche and the neighborhood. Once the immediate and automatic have been laid on the canvas, Ramirez hones in on themes and connections that emerge, moving from a singular imagistic focus to the relationship and balance of the whole. Javier Ramirez uses airbrush and acrylic paint, working in layers to build up a relationship between what is seen and unseen, creating moments of unpredictable clarity and vibrancy. 

Ramirez has honed an ability to scaffold the world around him in a sense of possibility and promise. His paintings are composed of acrylic, oil, pencil, airbrush, and solid markers while his sculptures are constructed of plaster, clay, metal, and found materials from his neighborhood. What results is a joyous dream of recalibrated relations; inter-species, cross-cultural and inter-generational. Animals and towering plants appear often in his work, balanced against family memorabilia and distinctly Southern Californian street objects such as a prickly pear cactus or deflated soccer ball. A saturated and idealistic maker, Javier Ramirez works with a brazen particularity, translating the vernacular terrain of the world inside and around him. A third space emerges in the city and is echoed through Ramirez’s work—the slippage between public and private creating an imaginal realm. Ramirez holds this key; his paintings depict a rambunctiously tender universe that memorializes the spell between culture, land and spirit. 

Founded in 2012, Untitled Art is a leading contemporary art fair taking place annually on the sands of Miami Beach. Guided by a mission to support the wider art ecosystem, Untitled Art offers an inclusive platform for discovering contemporary art that prioritizes collaboration within each aspect of the fair.