Damián Ramis
I was born among sculptures. I learned to walk among plaster molds, half-kneaded clay, and bronze figures, while watching my mother modeling large anatomical shapes out of clay, with the prelude of a Chopin piece floating in the studio. Drawing was my first childhood passion; school notebooks were the best mediums for inventing colorful fantasy characters that often made me forget the monotony of the classrooms.
At nine years old I had the idea of taking apart a Walt Disney film from a toy cinema and replacing the reel with another one that I drew and colored by hand, featuring a daring fisherman fighting huge sharks on the high seas. Perhaps that’s when the iconoclast I’ve always carried inside was born; an iconoclast who needs to walk his own paths.
I entered adolescence with The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding as the soundtrack. It’s no wonder then that, in that psychedelic and turbulent sixties setting, with my creative hormones boiling, I dedicated myself to drawing dozens of hippie posters and decorating beautiful message t-shirts: “Make love as if it was the war”, “Life is a woman and Soul music”.
I began my academic preparation at the School of Arts and Crafts, where for two years I drew large classic statues in charcoal and began studying figure drawing. I left that stage more learned but not tamed. My passion to keep searching for new ways to express myself with different materials led me to alternate those tidy charcoal drawings with experiments burning color waxes on canvas and insect drawings made with coffee.
After a fleeting period at the Superior School of Fine Arts of San Fernando (Madrid), I joined the Faculty of Fine Arts Sant Jordi (Barcelona), majoring in Sculpture, where I lived with a handful of boring teachers and fascinating classmates. Back in Mallorca I joined a group of artists with whom I experimented with video art, photocopying as a creative medium, and public performances. In that time – the 80s – I worked on concrete pieces, pigmented fabrics, and polyester resin figures. Since then, research and the search for new forms and colors on different paths has been a common thread in my work. Along the way there have been losses and encounters, doubts and certainties. But it was –and continues to be- the journey.
Over the years, my work –both sculpture and painting– has traveled to Barcelona, Madrid, Geneva, Toulouse, Shanghai, London, Stockholm, Kiel, Paris, New York and San Juan de Puerto Rico. Although the important thing is that, wherever my works are, they all continue alive and growing.
The essential thing is that my work always throbs as a new reality; that it is the excited and exciting physical representation of the life I contemplate every day with the same starry eyes as that child who filled his school notebooks with drawings.
