Mirroring Nature (2007-2010)

"The emblem of the automobile as an embodiment of the promise of America as an icon of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness would permeate the entire culture, Catholic and Protestant alike, and this metaphor of corporeal intelligence would be reinforced throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties."

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar

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In a city designed to be driven, not walked, "your car is like your shoes" as the local mantra asserts and the landscape is fashioned from crowded highways and streets coexisting with manicured public gardens mostly comprised of non-native invasive plants, which themselves are elegantly reflected in the glistening bumpers of 4-wheel-drive trucks and SUVs.

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My paintings reflect fragments of this mixed landscape where conflicting elements dialogue with each other. The buildings glass facades reflect the pack of cars whose windshields and bumpers in turn reflect the Washington and Cardboard Palms, the Surinam Cherries, and the red Ixora flowers planted throughout the city. These deceptively beautiful paintings on canvas, carry an embedded warning about where this nonsensical superhighway may be taking us.

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Rafael López-Ramos

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"The production of desire in Lopez-Ramos' latest works is not only achieved through the mirroring effects of the body cars, as the projection of nature's image assaulted by fetishism, but also from the internal structure of the production of commodities that is sustained by the subject, whose ontology exist only to control the culture field of desiring.

 

As we have already said, this new Mirroring Nature series configure several polysemic levels of a critique directed to the cultural industry as well as to global capitalism, to the North American values and its own ideological daydreamings, to the appearances of happiness in the post-industrialized context and the manufacturing of desire in the age of the image. Even though the artist has achieved a very personal expression, these artworks give us the impression that he has found his space between the static pictorial presence of David Hockney and the hyperrealist paintings of Richard Estes. Like in these two artists, the space in Rafael painting is always geographical (something, by the way, that has been present throughout his early works in Cuba during the 1980s): a return to the city and the fragments that withhold it."

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Gerardo Muñoz, "The fragments of desire in Rafael López-Ramos' recent works"

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"De primera impresión, la serie parece complacer la voracidad sensorial mediante el deslumbramiento de las espejerías manufacturadas por la modernidad primermundista, entre cuyos reflejos descubrimos la imagen de una vegetación también estilizada y cosmética, como si fuese un simple ejercicio de captura del entorno, donde lo más comprometido sería de connotación ecológica, avizorado en los diálogos entre máquina, prefabricado y trazas de vegetación.

Pero hay algo implícito en estas superficies relumbrantes de autos, cromos y otras vitrinas que apunta a ciertas suspicacias epistémicas. Son ráfagas subliminales que tienen que ver más con el ojo crítico y el peso de la circunstancia actual, pero que no libra de vincularlas con las ocultas precariedades del establishment megacorporativo en una ciudad típicamente postindustrial como Miami."

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Jesús Rosado, "Autos, cromos y otras vitrinas", Cubaencuentro.

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"Urban languor interspersed with Burger Kings, McDonald’s and plenty of used-cars lots with blasting music and garish advertising. Who else would cogitate this daily routine to and from work, as he comes across the flatness of a human-bare, treeless, automobile artery like Le Jeune Road? López-Ramos turns this landscape of kitsch upside-down.

His paintings are like little oases of the banal. Detailed, zoomed in, and magnified, a single focal point reflecting the richness of concomitant spaces. These colorful cityscapes offer something unique to the artist’s eye: A rowdy distortion on a chassis, an optical illusion reflected on a side-mirror, or just a cool play of reflections on a wheel-rim."

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Alfredo Triff, "How a barren world seeing as reflected by mirrors, fenders, chassis and other shining surfaces, becomes a focal point."

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