Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, whose work is rooted in the cultural tradition of Latin American graphic arts, explores the narrative possibilities of drawing. Through the different semantic layers that they make visible and legible these drawings, which have been enhanced through different printing techniques, amalgamate various cultural codes with a personal allegorical lexicon and thereby intertwine the “culturally specific” with global issues. Originally from Salvador, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo is interested in establishing a relation between the image of a Salvadorian memory and the North American socio-political landscape. Historically, oral tradition is at the heart of the Latin American approach to images. Its function, among other things, is to keep the consciousness of collective memory alive. For over ten years, the artist has been interested precisely in this question, and more particularly in the representation of the body viewed as the site and symbol of historical traumas.
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The very large drawings that he is presenting for Legend, Myths and Icons are a continuation of his gathering of numerous stories intimately linked with the bloody events which took place in Salvador in 1980-the year in which the artist immigrated with his family to Canada in order to escape the civil war. This work proposes an iconography that he qualifies as critical, but that also consists of a rich allegorical lexicon in which a bestiary-worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch-and borrowings from various local legends are skillfully placed alongside different codes drawn from North American popular culture. This harsh and colourful grand carnival, which is inextricably linked to the artist's life path, can be seized as a rich proposition on questions of memory, remembrance, but also on that of a cultural identity and the stigmata of a history, how ever politicized it may be.
YP/translation BAS
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