Image via Latino Arts
You’ve probably seen Mauricio Ramirez’s artwork, even if you don’t know it. His work accents walls, tunnels and other infrastructure in urban environments around the United States, with an especially significant presence in Chicago and Milwaukee. Standouts are his 100 ft. mural of two girls at 728 North James Lovell Street, downtown, a very prominent horizontal portrait of the late singer Selena at Fifth and Bruce in Walker’s Point, and a spectacular 125 ft horizontal mural of four female portraits on Marquette’s campus.
If these don’t ring any bells, you can visit Latino Arts through October 1 to jog your memory and catch a more intimate view of Ramirez’s canvases and mural mockups in an exhibition entitled appropriately, “Poly Wave: Seeds of Color and Shape.”
At the very least, this collection of 30 schematics, digital prints, and original acrylics on canvas, will help you recall the work you’ve already seen on the streets of Milwaukee and Chicago. These more intimate visions are unmistakably his own but resonate differently in the confined and controlled gallery space than they do outdoors at monumental scale. Outside, Ramirez’s faceted and pixelated representations benefits from the optics possible within the urban street scape. There, the transition between colorful geometric abstractions and photo-based representation as you navigate around them—and given their places, you’re always moving around them. This gives them a certain stealth factor as street art, while inside, in a more prescribed scenario, they lose some of the surprise.
‘Sky Sanctuary Zone’
But where they lose the potential to ambush, they gain other attributes. On canvas, his original acrylics read more formally. Medium sized originals like In Nature succeed almost entirely as a mosaic of contrasting shards of high-chroma oranges and greens. The profile of an allegorical mother nature figure and a sky in the top register almost stay hidden. Even more pared-down, the work Sky Sanctuary Zone only reveals its representational cargo with the help of its title and all the distance the gallery can spare. The same is true of a small painting called Mixtape of what may be an LP, but works just fine as a misshapen circle filled in with colorful trapezoids and irregular triangles against a gradated burnt orange background.
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The digital prints included in the show tend to have finer detail than the original acrylics and are thus less ambiguous as images. We grasp their optics immediately. The schematics, too, are less ambiguous, but are also very helpful in showing Ramirez’s process of designing and executing his large-scale projects. It’s a fascinating insight into images that seem so complete in situ that one forgets to consider how they are dreamt up. Painstaking and systematically, it turns out.
“Poly Wave” is a colorful and handsome show that will delight your eyes while you’re in the gallery. Especially the original works are trippy kaleidoscopic delectations that invite prolonged visual engagements. As fetching as the imagery is though, they’re best as primers for the astounding work Ramirez has put on everything from utility boxes to overpasses. Come experience this exhibition if only to enjoy the endless scavenger hunt it will lead to as you look for all the mind-blowing Ramirezes up, and popping up, across your urban landscape.
