Since the early 1990s, Ángel Ramírez, a 1982 graduate of Cuba’s famed Instituto Superior de Arte and long-time professor of art, has created work deliberately referential of Medieval Europe. Like the hauntingly ghoulish images of his mentor Antonia Eiriz and the realist chronicler of consciousness (whom state censors forced into exile), Tomás Sánchez, Ramírez comments on contemporary Cuba through the visual exploration of taboos. Paradoxes of power and ironic reproductions of anti-modern concepts of time, perspective and production resonate through his work. Even as it appears European and therefore foreign in its imagery, works like La Madre are deeply Cuban: here Ramírez portrays the embodiment of a monarch whose control and reach are so encompassing, so total that they transcend even the patriarchal condition that infantilizes others to colonize the gendered role and concept of a mother. I photographed this recently completed piece as it lay on the floor of Ramírez’s Old Havana studio.
