CHAZEN MUSEUM OF ART - CERTAINTY AND DOUBT: PAINTINGS BY DAN RAMIREZ - 1975-2017    Curator - Ann Sinfield

Excerpted from A Minimalist Romance

 Richard Shiff

 A meaning to be sensed

“…Beyond the delight in crafting an aesthetic object, Ramirez believes that he benefits from being present as the object he creates assumes its meaning…not a meaning that he expresses or instills, but a meaning that the work offers to perception. Painting is not solitary; Ramirez understands it as social. If it affects his senses, emotions and intellect, it should affect others analogously. The beneficial perception can be anyone’s: “I am hopeful that the spirit that resides in the object of contemplation that I create…will alter a viewer’s perceptions [and provide] a conduit to truth and meaning,” Ramirez wrote. In the same set of typescript musings, he alludes to the passage from an absence of perceptible meaning to the presence of meaning – perceptible but ineffable – in a specific situation: “A painting is an ‘is,’ as an ‘is’ that has no content, until – it is! A painting just is, he seems to be saying, until it exists just for you. Or to extend the thought: until it is you; until it holds the entirety of your consciousness."

Pg. 12 Certainty and Doubt: Paintings by Dan Ramirez (Exhibition Catalogue)

 La Duquesa de la Luz en Gallifa, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72,     2005

Excerpted from Music of Spheres

Buzz Spector

“The definition of aletheia in philosophy is that of a disclosed truth, one that is manifest more than spoken. The cosmos manifested in these prints conveys the idea of musicality toward which Dan aspires in a different manner than how reading a musical score offers up its melody. We stand silent before Aletheia and the Cosmos, the fact of whose silence avails us to grasp its spiritual dimension. This homage to Messiaen reverberates between hearing and seeing. As William Carlos Williams puts it, in “Song,” a brief lyric out of Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)

                                                undying accents

                                                repeated till

                                                the ear and the eye lie

                                                down together in the same bed

Pg. 25  Certainty and Doubt: Paintings by Dan Ramirez (Exhibition Catalogue)

  Aletheia and the Cosmos: An Homage to Olivier Messiaen and the “Visions of the Amen.” 

                                                        Digital prints on 20 aluminum panels   59 x 59    2010 - 2017