FITS Caps- Alfredo Ramírez

FITS Capsules is Alfredo Ramírez’s first project with arte_FITS.Foundation and Sala de Exposiciones del Plata. Alfredo, a Venezuelan artist living in Milan, Italy, is the first international artist to join this virtual initiative.

The artist was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 19571 and grew up in Mérida2. He decided on this career at an early age3 and, to that end, began his training at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas in Caracas in 1975.4 Two years later, he was working at Studio Foong. He relocated to Italy, at 21 years of age, where he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Brera Academy of Fine Arts) in Milan from

1980-1982 and the Associazione Internazionale Incisori, the Scuola Internazionale della Grafica (International Institute of Graphics) and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (Academy of Fine Arts) in Venice from 1982-1985.5 Alfredo returned to Venezuela six years later and began to teach drawing, painting, and printmaking at the Universidad de los Andes6, located in Mérida. In 2002, he studied at the Hochschule für bildende (University of Fine Arts) in Künste, Hamburg.7 He currently resides in Milan, Italy where he is developing and producing various projects.

Alfredo is a multidisciplinary artist who works with a variety of materials to create works which vary in scale. He constructs “living” sculptures out of metal components and high voltage transformers, freezers, industrial pneumatic and mechanical systems, photography, and photosensitive pigments8 which he has complemented with X-ray images to represent his meditations on the relationship between the body and soul9, the living and the inert.10 The artist has produced monumental public sculptures out of stainless steel, glass, steel, wood, plastic, and iron.11 Alfredo’s abstract graphic murals are drawn with graphite or painted with wax on canvas and wood and incised in marble.12 He also produces paintings by utilizing wax on canvas or fabric and acrylic on leather.13 In his 2018 exhibition Virtus Dormitiva, he references Molière’s “The imaginary sick”and presented meditations on the contemporary indifference to external events in drawings on travel stubs, engravings of geometrically harmonious female bodies, and large sculptures of desert spiders.14

During his quarantine, ongoing for more than two months, Ramírez has decided to make good use of his time to continue a series of drawings of helical shapes he has developed since adolescence. He shares the most recent outlines of the contours he has transferred from paper to sculpture, such as Dragon Project (2012) and the monumental Atawa (2013), and considers these as relevant as the finalized pieces.

Text by Irma Arzola & Marinelly Bello