Pathway - Reverting to the Conches

This article was the result of an investigation conducted in 1999 by Hungarian Judit Sarosdy, art historian and critic. This research was commissioned by the Ferenc Mora Museum, Szeged, when the sculptor lived in Hungary. It makes a deep study about Sylvia Ramirez....

The name and work of Sylvia Ramirez Rello- a Mexican sculptress currently living in Hungary- are perhaps better known and rated in Europe than in her own country, for the simple reason that this pupil of Francisco Zúñiga, on leaving of National School of Painting and Sculpture, La Esmeralda, in Mexico City, came to round off her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and subsequently al Geneva University´s School of Architecture (1974-1977); moreover, her professional career has been pursued mainly in Europe. Despite this, her tender human figures, classical portraits and bronze-cast torsos have earned acclaim in both continents.

During a long and prolific artistic career, she has demonstrated her talent at a number of individual and collective exhibitions, and has also won prizes and invitations to a variety of for a. Her works are to be found in both private collections and important institutions and museum, including the Palace of the United Nations in Geneva, where one of her works, donated by the Mexican Government, is on permanent display. This disquieting bronze figure of a boy sitting with arm raised in a defensive gesture has become the artist´s best-Known work. Its message, which still remains valid, besides being a protest again all form of aggression, may also be her ars poetica. In any event ¿Civilización? – Civilization? is considered to mark a turning-point in her oeuvre: from figurative style, classical in inspiration, from expressive modeled form, to the abstract.

The mutilated, almost amorphous figures of the series entitled 1+1=1 show us the desired but impossible fusion between human beings. The unrealized embraces and kisses of her creatures are monumental symbols of our demythologized times. In her multimedia work Alienación-Alienation, the five ancestral figures-inspired by the kings and beings of Henry Moore, recast in prehispanic mould-transmute into representatives of global dehumanization. This four-dimensional mobile, besides providing supreme testimony of the artist´s anxious quest, is a complex work which even conjures up the idea of a future, large-scale sculpture. In it, space links with time, rhythm with movement, plastic forms with intangible music, pre-classical with modern techniques. How well the artist´s desire to break down human alienation would be fulfilled if such a sculpture were to be erected in a public place in the full view of passers-by wearied by the daily grind, perhaps as centre-piece of a fountain in a park somewhere.

Although Sylvia Ramírez´s expressive and figurative style registered changes over the years, in the a980´s, it underwent a major development: from modeled clay and cast bronze to the advent of “de-composition”. Her sculptures in marble from the period are more markedly abstract; while the hardness of the material signified a new trial of strength for her on account of the slow and concentrated work it demanded, the sheer white Carrara marble inspired her to produce a number of taut, simple forms, after the manner of Brancusi. The Albatros muerto- Dead Albatross (1988) and Pájaro – Bird (1990) are very clear examples of how the material suggests the way the artist should proceed. Since the nineties, her production has increased with new versions of the torsos and of her Fusión (1992) to arrive at a synthesis. The Torso de Mujer – Torso of a Woman (1993), with its classical, yet surprising composition- surprising for its hammock form – holds Mediterranean allusions- while the Amantes de los caracoles – Lovers of the Conches, with its monolithic or antropo-zoomorphic forms, reached much farther afield.

Rooted in prehispanic tradition, influenced by European culture and sculpture – from the Greek, via the Italian Renaissance, to the vanguard of our century – they appear to be nourished by the common sources of humanity. The Mexican or Mesoamerican elements from the conch to the syncretic – the gods created from animals and human beings- apart from the allusion to the original primitive culture, also hold a global message: the eternal struggle between Life and Death goes on. Her torsos also seem like archaeological finds from centuries to come, or reminiscences of times long past, the representatives of eternal harmony and longed-for unity. The movement and, above all, the torsion, which is the sculptress’s favorite plastic expression, are proof of her anatomical knowledge, as well as her great capacity for abstraction. Among others, there is the beautiful recumbent Torso (1997), like a mutilated Venus de Milo; or the new version of the challenge to Euclidean mathematics – the two nude human figures added together by a general process of osmosis: 1 + 1 = 1.

The new sculpture of Sylvia Ramirez, with their concentrated forms and their surfaces as flat and as smooth as stones shaped by water and wind remind us of the beautiful, simple pieces of the important Hungarian sculptor, Miklós Borsos (1906-1990), who lived and worked in Tihany, inspired by the charm of Lake Balaton. Despite the excellence of his oeuvre, he remained somewhat isolated from the world. I wish Sylvia luck, living and working as she has done for some time now in two different worlds; through her work she could build bridges between our two continents, enriching with new universal values both European and Mesoamerican plastic art.

Judit Sárosdy
Historian and art critic.