At the end of the sixties, artists united under the name of Support Surface, wondered again what painting is, what is the physical reality of the painting? They push painting into its most radically materialistic materiality, prohibiting emotion from it. Like his predecessors, Ramirez Katz questions the matter of painting confronted with that of the support. It results in the opposite effect, leaving the field free to emotion. Not long ago, playing on the rough edges of the canvas texture, she transformed it into a landscape. Currently it goes even further, the canvas becomes the place of confrontations of forms like a topographical space where the landscape appears hollow indicated by the contrast of “colors-forms”: “The signs gradually reveal their secrets. By exploiting the opposition between full and empty, she confronts the same visual paradigm as Chinese artists. The Chinese artist identifies the landscape according to its coded aspect. He designates it under the name of Shanshui which means mountain and water. Oriental artists imbued with the culture of the intangible produced literary landscapes built from the intellectual representation they made of it ... The opposition between full and empty they have always felt and assimilated in their representations. Their unreal landscapes are not the transposition of the landscape on the canvas. Penetrated by the landscape, they illustrate its subjective reality. Their works are sometimes accompanied by writings. Ramirez Katz develops a synthetic language that leads him to an effective signage abstraction. It does not describe the landscape, it condenses it through the dynamics of emotion: “An emotion that a landscape gives can make use of it - like a word - and pour itself into it entirely, since it was originally wrapped. Emotion, landscape will no longer be linked by relation of cause and effect, but indeed by this indefinable connection, where no more creditor and no more debtor, - by this association of word and idea, of the body and the soul; ... ”writes André Gide in his Cahiers. The artist puts in relation his black and full jagged masses which seem to weigh, like pieces of heavy ore, with the ranges of thin and subtly geometrical colors. The reds pour in, the blues spread in gravity like lakes or lava. Solar yellows produce a feeling of gravity in movement, the artist thinks of telluric forces, the secrets of the Earth felt, synthesized, aestheticized. These forces which intersect on the canvas are guided by the void which crosses them and lightens them. The void completes the entire canvas organizing the direction of the bodies. This is how the landscape is formed, expands and takes on its true scale, as in Chinese painting, the circulation of the wind which separates the mountains. Ramirez-Katz's recent works remind me of the Nabis, and Vuillard in particular perhaps because of this similarity with the art of textile printing. At Ramirez Katz, the canvas is not white. It keeps the delicate texture and color of linen. The drama that plays out inside is absorbed by the textile. We can see this work in many ways. Gentleness and violence are accomplished in a strange friendship. - Ileana Cornea Paris, July 2015
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