ISABEL RAMOS
Bio
Isabel Ramos is part of a family with a long and celebrated tradition in the arts, an upbringing that greatly influenced her development as an artist. During her academic studies, Ramos gave emphasis to the method and to the concept of abstract knowledge. These too fundamental aspects are incrusted and visible in all Ramos’ works, especially in the conception of space and in the artistic expression.
Since an early age that she pursuits and experiences the natural environment with great intensity and wonder, and that has become the core of her practice. Ramos draws from a register of experiences, newly acquired knowledge and memories from her travels and cultures she came to know. Then there is a turning point, when the artist adds the intention and obsession of appropriation.
There are many examples of this in her work, for instance the thickness of the frames carefully painted just to recreate pieces of nature, as well as the unframed canvas of large dimensions hanging slightly apart from the wall to enhance the spirit of the origin.
All of the artist’s works are developed in continuity. A sequence as it were a set of pages – that doesn’t necessarily follow the ‘standard order’ – but of the same narrative. The conception relies on a minimum use of sketches and is almost exclusively mental.
When Ramos begins a new piece of work, she bears in mind, beforehand, how the composition is going to turn out as well as almost all the details. The materials and the techniques that the artist employs are carefully chosen to obtain the intended result, while attention is still given to their expression, materiality and physicality, and always driven by a deep concern with their rigor and quality.
Curator Review
To paint observing nature is a tradition that has gone beyond any descriptive necessity, of identification, cataloging and definition of property. The landscape has always been a theme in the history of painting, a theme that is almost universal although it has been more formally structured and codified in the Orient than in the West. In our culture, landscape constituted since the nineteenth century the theme that worked as the pretext for the investigation of language. Think of the impressionists and their descendants, or previously the dramatic projection of the romantic ego.
The work of Isabel Ramos here presented is characterized by an attitude that can be classified as a lyric divagation about landscape. Many of her images are taken in seaside or rural environments that the artist selects to construct single or serial works with those representations. More than an attitude of simple professional investigation, one can clearly feel that what initiated the process was a moment of enchantment with landscape reality, out of which the artist collected the images, so as to initiate a path of elaboration of her own language of fine arts. For taxonomic reasons, one can include this painting in the category of lyric abstractionism.
This is a curious situation: on the one hand it is a very disciplined imagetic exploration, of manifest rigor, but simultaneously there is an inevitable exaltation of the initial image, on the basis of the whole process. From the landscape that is seen and lived to the abstract landscape, into which the artist transformed it, is where this work is situated, in a process that is eminently contemporary, of assemblage and de-materialization of the images.
This exhibition demonstrates that there are eternal themes and attitudes in the history of painting that perhaps always arise from the pleasure of looking and capturing into art the essence of that observation. For as much alienated and distant that natural reality might seem, it is manifested in the human condition; in the sensitivity of the artist facing landscape, letting her capacity of enchantment with the prodigies that nature has to offer, feeling the human condition as something belonging to the natural. To fit in a cosmic whole, and reach profoundly the pleasure of that involvement, is something that some artists can achieve, as proved now by Isabel Ramos.
Sílvia Chicó
Curriculum
Isabel Ramos was born in Lisbon in 1950.
She obtained a degree in Visual Arts – Painting, from Faculdade de Belas Artes, University of Lisbon.
She worked as a designer, and was an art teacher from 1975 to 2009, accumulating this activity with coordination functions in the Portuguese Ministry of Education, namely training art teachers and devising knowledge tests.
She has been exhibiting her work regularly, being represented in both public and private collections in Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom and Brazil.