JRS-Blog

Art Blog.

And that, you know, was happening just out of
emotional impulse, as if I were in another place.” 

The concept of landscape as a psychological
state of mind is at the core of what I have developed as art. More than the
physical experience we have by living the landscape, we see our culture and mental construction of the popular imagination from icons projected upon the
picture we confront. As in a psychotic break with reality, in which two
separate events are happening at once, art can also be experienced this way; on the one hand, it could be lived as a projection of our uncommonness, as an escape
from reality but without attachment to it, or as reality itself. In both ways, we are perceiving a construction in which one process of perception is
not aware of the other but simultaneously complements the other. 

In a way, my body of work has been developed through batches where I search for a specific ideal. Ambiguity or ambivalence is the core of these ideals, coming closer to it or dodge it makes that final images a tool for analissis.  

I continuously move around a body of ideas, revisiting spaces and approaching them from different angles. Even when there are no dramatic changes in the final product, mentally, I believe I have diverted the ideas to e new spectrum.  

In a general view, the work attempts to create a landscape-like image constructed with common household materials. As in poetry, a Haiku
describes nature; I used the resulting visual mannerism based on representational fundamentals to portray a state of
mind.  

 Statement-Julio Ramon Serrano. 2012

THE FLOW OF A SHIFTING LANDSCAPE 

Serrano’s work has been about manipulating the concept of landscapes so that his images avoid the standard canon of contemplation that the landscape genre (both pictorial and photographic) evokes. Instead, the artist prioritizes meaning, in a subtle and manipulative way, by deconstructing and making banal, the landscape. He creates an image with subtlety and the appearance of being meaningless, where symbols and signs are relied on to confirm the social environment.

His art reflects a transitional state of semi-forgetfulness, of an ambiguous journey through the experience of a transplanted consciousness, in which the artist’s life story acquires both a conceptual density and a liberating lightness.

The artist succeeded in reconciling two permanent states of his trajectory. On the one hand, he tends to deconstruct and question a given reality using technology, i.e. the photographic camera (either in the form of an actual image or as a reference to one) and his penchant for modelling reality. But, on the other hand, it demonstrates his representational mannerisms and strategies, his mise-en-scène, and his sense of make-believe reality.

FRAGMENT: Words for the catalogue, Ramon Serrano by Dannys Montes De Oca,2013

In these works, the artist succeeds in resolving the apparent incoherence between the ephemeral and the eternal and reconciling the contradictions between fragility and permanence, solidity and fluidity. The artist’s perspective incorporates equal degrees of gravity and drama with narrative  of a situation lived, which he confronts and analyzes as an experience. Serrano’s universe consists of emotional states, shifting landscapes, and puzzling, unsettling images in which he reveals himself as an excluded observer. His artworks’ use of texts and words suggests his relationship with identity and his reality lived and remembered. His art reflects a transitional state of semi-forgetfulness, of an ambiguous journey through the experience of a transplanted consciousness, in which the artist’s life story acquires both a conceptual density and a liberating lightness.

FRAGMENT: Words for the catalogue, Ramon Serrano by Dannys Montes De Oca, 2013

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Ramón Serrano: It’s Hot, It’s Cold

  TORONTO | ONTARIO | CANADASEP 11, 2013 - OCT 12, 2013

Cuban painter Ramón Serrano presents a new body of work with “It’s Hot, It’s Cold,” a series of heroically scaled colour scapes scrolled with text and unsettled by visual contradiction. Working in vivid palettes, Serrano returns to a previous construction method, wherein he creates his extensive canvases from self-made, small-scale table-top scenarios. Their prototype becomes purposefully evident, Serrano’s mountainous vistas taking on the appearance of Crumpled paper, exciting confutations between the grandiose and the faint. Further, Serrano scrawls the mountain bases with words like “HEROIC” and “REFUGE,” ushering into these landscapes the vulnerability and the power of ideology while suffusing his imagined otherworlds with political contradiction. Given Serrano’s birthplace and the catalogue of work he’s produced in response to Cuba’s geographic and political isolation, these terms sit timorous and unfixed.

As a metaphor, It’s Hot. Its Cold remains in flux. The dualism of these thought-bubble allegories, the dreamlike landscapes and their spare design, signal from a future where the world’s very character teeters between the sublime and the dystopic. Ramón Serrano’s paintings speak plainly of complicated, still-agitating truths. We stir in their wake as from a dream of fierce disquiet.

2003: Series Utopias or Limbo, Abstractions.  Photography

Displays:

 “WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SEE”

-2005, Corkin Gallery, Toronto, Canada. 

- 2004, Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center. Havana, Cuba,

-2003, Faculty of Visual Art, Higher Institute of Fine Art,(ISA) 

Habana Libre,

What you see is what you see,

… A monument to an increasingly fraught state of tension
between capitalism and socialism, the Habana Libre is also the subject of Ramon
Serran’s equally monumental collection of painting from 2003,  What you see is what you see, ( Lo que se ve
es lo que se ve) A Cuban artist and former dean of the Instituto Superior de Arte
at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba,….., Serrano has produced a series that
is the most in-depth engagement with hotel space since Edgar Hopper’s . In some
thirty works ranging from large-scale canvases to sketches and watercolors, the artist captures in an ironic fashion the enduring monumentality of the Habana
Libre as a symbol of the Cuban Revolution. Through his intense meditation of
the building’s façade and the repletion of this central image, Serrano brings a
new perspective not only to the way that artists have portrayed the hotel on canvas
but also to the building’s fundamentally unique relationship to time that
contributes to its unique qualities, he attended to both elements by blurring
and doubling the omnipresent image of the hotel that confronts Habana residents
as it visually occupies the city, thus inflecting one of the most over aspects
of the public archive of the revolution. In doing so, Serrano’s work becomes a subtle yet powerful commentary on the built environment’s relationship to
history and memory. It also offers a palpable criticism of the persistence of
an institution into which the  “ordinary”  Cubans for whom the revolution was fought were
excluded from entering when international tourism returned to the island and boomed
during the 1990s. Even this prohibition has been lifted, economic realities
make a stay at the Habana Libre impossible for Cuban citizens, and hotel
security still restricts entry at the door in an attempt to deter prostitution.
I propose that Serrano’s work builds on the understanding of the space’s unique
spatial and temporal qualities.  

Robert A Davidson, The Hotel occupied space, the pictorial Hotel,
pp 35-36

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Utorontopress.com

Viewing room, Corking Gallery 2012 

Displays:

- 2015 Feria De Arco, Madrid , Spain. 

Two different moments, Toronto Art Fair 2016

Solo Show, 2013

Desert- Mirage, Installation. 

2006, IX biennale de la Habana, 

The hotel that ‘will not go away Gary MICHAEL DAULTSPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED JANUARY 29, 2005

This article was published more than 16 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

COMMENTSSHARE

Ramon Serrano

The way Ramon Serrano paints it, the Hotel Habana Libre in downtown Havana is a gigantic modernist chimera of a building, huge and grey like a dirty iceberg.

In the installation of his spectral Hotel Habana Libre paintings, opening today at Toronto’s Corkin Shopland Gallery (his first solo North American exhibition), Serrano’s images are huddled together like persistent visions from a dream that will not end. Taken together, the paintings form a ghostly and imagistically relentless environment in which the hotel’s anatomization at the painter’s hands in no way helps to defuse or deconstruct its sinister force as an oppressive image.

It does, however, serve to amplify the hotel’s historic meaning for the Cuban people. “No matter where you are in Havana,” Serrano tells me, “you can see the hotel. It will not go away.”

What will also not go away is the building’s inner social and political narrative. It began its life, in the early 1950s, as a Hilton hotel, a bastion of bourgeois privilege and an emblem of class consciousness in Cuba.

During the first triumphant days of the revolution, in 1959, Fidel Castro commandeered the hotel, turning it into his seat of government and renaming it Hotel Habana Libre. Now, having come full circle, the building is once again a middle-class tourist hotel, from which, Serrano notes bitterly, ordinary Cubans are barred.

In so obsessively and sumptuously painting this hulking structure, Serrano – who, at 37, is not only a prodigiously gifted artist but is also the dean of the Instituto Superior de Arte at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba – is clearly working out something that is both central to his own sensibility and pivotal to Cuban culture. The way Serrano paints the hotel betrays the fact that the project began with his black-and-white photographs of the place – all those silvery greys and velvety blacks. Also characteristic of the photos, and unusual in architectural renderings, is the fact that Serrano has actually painted his images of the hotel as if they were a series of double-exposures: The building’s edges shimmer and overlap, repeat themselves nearby, elide one another, and extend themselves meaninglessly into the surrounding space. The building, in Serrano’s hands, is impossible to bring into focus.

Serrano’s project is called LO QUE SE VE ES LO QUE SE VE – What You See is What You See. But what you see is insubstantial, optically diffuse, a sort of gridded, modernist mirage. Rendering the Hotel Habana Libre graphically imprecise defeats most of the documentary information the paintings might have been expected to convey and works instead to replace the historic with the mythic.

And everybody knows that myth is infinitely more forceful than history.

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Over the years I have been developing formal mannerisms to evoque the language of painting as a way of presenting the topics I choose.  I try to minimalize this as much as possible, using the most elemental principles of pictorial language like composition, light, shadows, perspective, sometimes breaking them, to trigger a narrative or to escape from the trap of creating one.