Hissing snakes look on as men holding flaming torches set about burning numerous different human heads, masks, and shields. Great flames curl outwards, licking at fornicating bodies that fall through the air or hover in space above serpentine rivers of blue, red, and purple, while an enormous wide-open mouth bares teeth and gums in agony or pleasure. Looking closer, the surface of flame and river are multifaceted, molten, psychedelic even.
Ramirez made these paintings using a traditional encaustic process also known as hot wax painting. This method can be roughly broken down into two different activities – one constructive, the other destructive. The constructive activity is the making of the paint, which is achieved by mixing beeswax, copal, and pigments in a vessel on a hotplate. And, after layering the paint onto the plywood surface, the destructive activity of heating with a flaming torch transforms and binds the image. The heating or firing is an alchemical process which leaves space for chance or the unknown and connects with the present by transforming the past.
Ramirez is interested in the relationship between technique and magic as a return to a time in human history when both ideas were part of the same development of knowledge. He uses the example of a Mayan shaman, whose task is to es- tablish a direct connection to the spirit world and communicate with the gods through rituals, invocations, and sacred practices.
Reinterpreting the image of a Christian altarpiece in an English Church, transformed into a space for looking at art, Ramirez’s centrepiece is a symbol of rebirth that changes the colonial narrative of burning the idols, to firing – like the shaman who fires ceramic gods to bring them into the present. Ramirez says, The Burning of the Idols is a colonial codice painted by Indigenous hands, by order of the Spanish priest who documented the destruction of the pre-Hispanic religion in their Christianizing enterprise.
After the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, Franciscan missionaries – who were one of several groups responsible for the conversion of Indigenous Peoples to Christianity – set about destroying the material culture of Indigenous Peoples that they believed threatened their attempts at evangelization. Diego de Landa – a Franciscan friar in the Yucatán – determined Mayan culture contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil and destroyed an estimated 5,000 books and objects in a single bonfire in what were called extirpation campaigns.
Other scenes in Ramirez’s paintings reveal moments where he has found this sense of ritual transcendence in his daily intimate life - like pulling the emperor card from a tarot deck while sitting in the bath. This card symbolizes power, conversion, and conquest from one point of view and trauma, resiliency, and identity from a different perspective. Ramirez explains, This is why I incorporated snakes alongside the emperor, since they too bring a duality of symbols – divine in the pre-Hispanic and devil-like in the Christian.
The conversion of Indigenous Peoples often gets called a religious conquest, but it was more complicated than conquest and resistance. Conversion was also a negotiation where beliefs and rituals blended. Catholic missionaries appropriated Indigenous symbols and converts brought old practices to the new religion. Indigenous festivities fell on the same days as Catholic holy days, and the Catholic practice of confession merged with similar Indigenous rituals. Indigenous symbols were incorporated into Christian crosses. The basins once used to collect blood during human sacrifices were repurposed for baptisms, and religious syncretism created a new culture in Mexico. About this negotiation Ramirez says, My paintings show the continuous melting between two, a melting of abstraction and time, and further, The transformation of the idols in myself or others represents a way of living together with the past, but also with the present.
There’s perhaps no better example of this blend of Indigenous and Spanish culture than in Mexico City’s centrepiece, the Plaza de Zócalo, home to the Metropolitan Cathedral, a centre of Mexican Catholicism. Just across the street from the Cathedral are the ruins of Templo Mayor, the most important temple in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. This area in Mexico City has been a centre of Aztec belief, Catholicism, and Mexican nationalism for centuries.
Thinking about this, I recall a recent late afternoon in Cloudesley Square, Islington. I stood back and watched as Ramirez, flaming torch in hand, caressed the surface of his unfolded altarpiece, tracing the outlines of heads, masks, and shields. For a moment, I was taken back to the Zócalo, a place I’ve visited many times, and stood where many had crowded before me, with a hand sheltering my eyes in awe of the sun.
Text by Simon Linington.