Martín Ramírez
MNCARS, Madrid
Martín Ramírez (Rincón de Velásquez, México, 1895) is one of those great mysteries that contemporary art presents from time to time. An emigrant to prosperous California in 1925, the 1929 collapse left him jobless and immersed in a deep depression that robed him of the power of speech. He thus embarked on a wandering life until a year later he was found in a park in Los Angeles and institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital in San Joaquín County, diagnosed with manic depression. Despite his continuous escapes, from that moment on he would spend his life in mental institutions in the United States. And it was there that his artistic production began. Because of their undertone, Martín Ramírez’s works immediately bring to mind the labels of “schizophrenic art” or “art brut”, but we must value them far beyond the therapy into which painting was transformed.
The work of Tarmo Pasto, an art and psychology professor who first met the painter in the 1940s, and of Max Dunievitz, clin- ical director of the center where Ramírez died, allowed his almost four hundred and fifty drawings to escape from being destroyed. This exhibit gathers together more than sixty characteristic works, especially noteworthy among which are drawings and large-scale murals for which Ramírez used his own materials, such as homemade pigments or rudimentary glues. His iconography, which always includes Mexican elements, consists of northern landscapes crossed by railways, trucks, highways, rails and an ever recurring rider on horseback. These series of motifs and the permanence of drawing allowed him to preserve his memories and origin, besides being the perfect vehicle to express his fears and feelings.
