DAN RAMIREZ

SELECTIONS FROM THE "TWENTY CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE INFANT JESUS: An Homage to Olivier Messiaen." Collection of the Art Institue of Chicago.

The following is an excerpt from the catalogue for the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, January 22 to March 15, 1981. The essay in its entirety can be found in selected publications/podcasts.

“I chose the French composer Olivier Messiaen’s piano composition, “Vingt regards sur l’Enfant Jesus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus), as the theme for these prints so that I may pay homage to a man and to an art form that has been a great source of inspiration to me.

In “Vint regards,” Messiaen took up the same ideas of Dom Columbia Marmion (Le Christ dans ses mysteres) and Maurice Toesca (Les Douze regards) wherein they spoke of the contemplations of the shepards, of the angels, of the Virgin and of the Celestial Father. “Vint regards,” according to Messiaen, is an adaptation of these four themes while at the same time an addition of sixteen new contemplations. In speaking about the contemplations, Messaien has said that ‘…More than in all my preceding works, I have looked here for a language of mystical love, to be varied, powerful and tender, sometimes brutal, responding to multicolored commands.’ I too, in these twenty intaglio prints, have tried to formulate such a language – a language befitting the sublime nature of the subject.”

View installation video at MOCRA (Museum of Contemprary Religious Art) at bottom of page.

Contemplation of Silence

1981-80 ETCHINGS: TWENTY CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE INFANT JESUS - AN HOMAGE TO OLIVIER MESSIAEN