Ramon Peralta is a sort of restless machine who loves to dig in the unfathomable labyrinths of the soul. With sharp sensitivity and a singular sense of creation, his work becomes a fertile landscape for the imagination and scrutiny. Such is the sense that animates this current body of work in which storytelling and delirium go hand in hand. In this series the artist’s creations comes from the establish relationship with paper as a material, one of tools the artist use in initial process of creation. A compendium of recent works that envisions new lines of exploration, images of sophisticated brush lines turned into characters who trap all sorts of mysteries in their imaginary forest. The strength of color and the sensibility of strokes create a movement that does not exclude the spectator, but includes him, inviting him to activate his visual and emotional perception. Referring, in this case, to a fine art language that attracts both the linear writing as well as the speed with which color changes its attire, its meaning, growing dim and firing up equally whether the image be a character, or vegetation, or fields. His work as a result bring the viewer to a place of hope, rhythm, smile, remembrance or surprise.
Peralta’s proposal draws from the deep well of magic and realism. Both descriptions reveal essential attributes of an artistic personality that regards his artistic endeavor as creator; the right cauldron in which paper are transformed into alive character. On the other hand, there is something very special in the artist’s canvases that transport us through time in an unsurpassed way. While there are indeed surrealist elements in his work, such as psychic automatism and chance, that act as integral components and nourish the creative process, we also cannot deny a realist undercurrent and an attraction to history that inspires and is the cornerstone of Ramon Peralta’s proposal.
Ramon’s work resorts to the inclusivism and referencing so near the heart of contemporary art. His proposal also contains a metaphysical breath. The characters are generally carefully arranged at the center of the composition and are surrounded by an imaginary forest or an organic background, with only the horizon present as a necessary reference. The predominance of blue and green in the background continuously reaffirms the watery element, also evidenced in the artist’s depiction of rolled documents and animal like characters. The majority of the figures portrayed are posing for the artist, busts some times with no arms that stare at us with inquisitive gazes. It is precisely at this point that an incursion into objectual art takes over, with the portraits as point of departure from a personal cosmography born of his immersion in diverse cultures, Peralta’s paintings are populated by leaf and vegetation of life, we see our self in the figures with extenuated limbs that reach out over great distances, perhaps alluding to the artist’s desire to bring didactic messages into synchronic unison of the world.
The encounter with Ramon Peralta’s canvases cannot stay just in a sole moment of observation. His colors and forms find winding ways to get into our senses and pores, to run into our veins, to touch and finally be attached to the story told during the spans of loneliness. If it is true that nothing of what we capture from the outside can pass by unnoticed by the subconscious, the work of the artist is a reiteration of that truth. It is not only the strokes nor the brushes, the crushing colors nor the unending themes. It is everything without mediating more explanation than that of the anxiety of the spirit willing to nurture itself from authenticity.
Artist Statement
“Art is an imprint of human life, of human creation. One of the focuses of anthropology is the effect of these captured moments in images on the people of their time. I have come to think that artists and anthropologists work hand in hand in the most indirect way as, one produces the work that will be studied by the other as a reflection of what once was.”