Exhibition: Fabian Ramírez: Firing of the Idols

Hissing snakes look on as men holding flaming torches set about burning numerous different human heads, masks, and shields. Great flames curl outwards, licking at fornicating bodies that fall through the air or hover in space above serpentine rivers of blue, red, and purple, while an enormous wide-open mouth bares teeth and gums in agony or pleasure. Looking closer, the surface of flame and river are multifaceted, molten, psychedelic even.

Ramirez made these paintings using a traditional encaustic process also known as hot wax painting. This method can be roughly broken down into two different activities – one constructive, the other destructive. The constructive activity is the making of the paint, which is achieved by mixing beeswax, copal, and pigments in a vessel on a hotplate. And, after layering the paint onto the plywood surface, the destructive activity of heating with a flaming torch transforms and binds the image. The heating or firing is an alchemical process which leaves space for chance or the unknown and connects with the present by transforming the past.

Ramirez is interested in the relationship between technique and magic as a return to a time in human history when both ideas were part of the same development of knowledge. He uses the example of a Mayan shaman, whose task is to es- tablish a direct connection to the spirit world and communicate with the gods through rituals, invocations, and sacred practices.

Reinterpreting the image of a Christian altarpiece in an English Church, transformed into a space for looking at art, Ramirez’s centrepiece is a symbol of rebirth that changes the colonial narrative of burning the idols, to firing – like the shaman who fires ceramic gods to bring them into the present. Ramirez says, The Burning of the Idols is a colonial codice painted by Indigenous hands, by order of the Spanish priest who documented the destruction of the pre-Hispanic religion in their Christianizing enterprise.