ART CITIES: Brussels-Enrique Ramírez
Enrique Ramírez’s films, installations and photographs, full of poetry, question history and the contemporary world, with the sea as a recurring element in his creations. The works of Enrique Ramírez are like the symbol of a fragile glow, which refers to the state of the world, helping us to understand the challenges of humanity.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Michel Rein Gallery Archive
The frontality of Enrique Ramírez’s images, the way they seize us due to the luminous proximity of a body or a sail floating on the surface of the water; a drifting cross pointing to the sky, establish the possibility of a touch, sensitive, almost perceptible. Enrique Ramírez manages to absorb a part of his surroundings, his environment, and holds us in the splendour of the images: emotion, feeling and presence come to occupy the space, highlighting it. ‘ What will we do…’’ (Que ferons-nous) ? The question appears in neon, illuminating a space of uncertainty and echo. Inspired by Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, this phrase resonates like a beacon throughout Enrique Ramírez’s solo exhibition “The gesture where the sea is made”, marking a threshold where displacement, borders, and identity intertwine in a play of gestures. The gesture, in its repetition, in its fragility and strength, shapes this universe. It is the invisible thread that connects generations, territories, and cultures, like a map woven between doing and being. Each artwork in the exhibition is born from a manual act that is also an act of belonging: molding, engraving, sculpting, weaving, painting. The ceramics evoke a language in transit, a fragmented script attempting to articulate the inarticulable—the experience of migration, of inhabiting a space that is neither here nor there. These are gestures that shape not only objects but also memories, as if each imperfect form were a fragment of a place left behind, a blurred recollection. In the cement impressions of sails made by the artist’s father, the gesture becomes an imprint. The sail, a symbol of navigation and departure, is fixed in cement like an indelible mark of origin. Here, making is also a form of resistance: to preserve, to honor, to remember. The paintings, with their material and chromatic intensity, function as landscapes in transformation. They do not merely represent a place but embody the sensation of transit, of wandering. Like the sea, they are never static: color accumulates and fades, texture becomes a trace, and the painterly gesture turns into territory. Painting is also an act of displacement, a way of capturing the ephemeral, of finding in the layering of pigments a possible geography. The sea, in its violence and beauty, takes form in the tapestry. The woven wool translates the vastness of the ocean into an intimate, almost painterly gesture. Just as in the paintings—where color and texture construct landscapes of transit and memory—here, material becomes movement. The sea is a border, a passage, a possibility; it is where gesture becomes eternal, where making transforms into an act of defiance and creation.
Photo: Enrique Ramírez, Dos proas, 2024, oil on canvas, hand written text, 50 x 60 x 4 cm, © Enrique Ramírez, Courtesy the artist and Michel Rein Gallery
Info: Michel Rein Gallery, Washington straat 51A, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 13/3-13/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://michelrein.com/
