One Eyed Ulysses // Ramirez Suassi

PHROOM

JM RAMIREZ-SUASSI

One Eyed Ulysses

text by: Giada Pignotti
images: book scanning

An old chair is swallowed by poppies. There’s nothing you can do about it, they grow inside it too, the chair is completely broken down, it’s just an empty skeleton devoured by red flowers.

A yellow bag hangs from a branch and contains a mystery that fascinates us, give us horror and then it fascinates us again.

A boy doing a handstand on the streets of a city showing us only his bare and deformed feet. At the same time, specularly, the double severed trunk of a tree appears. The two images communicate with each other, they are, after all, the same thing squat and mutilated; both shaped by the violence of the time, by the experience that marked them, which they secretly tell. One in the middle of the city, the other in the silence of a wood. They are parallel worlds, those told by Ramirez-Suassi, and are always kept in touch by a mysterious thread: traces of the passage of man and of other life forms even in the most desolate and abandoned places, they are traces that seem almost contaminate these places with the precariousness of their existences, increasing that disquieting feeling of being in front of a scene that precedes or follows a catastrophic event.

These are places that the artist himself declares to return obsessively to visit those of “One Eyed Ulysses”, subjects that he doesn’t stop to observe over the time and from different angles. On each page a missing fragment of this silent, multi-voiced story is unearthed, it is a slow process, a strange journey that leads us to discover inevitable changes even in the most inanimate and incorruptible of objects, all rotting, rusting, falling back to the end, in a total silence.

Silence, after all, is a concept that often confronts the artist in his work, a concept on which he often prefers to remain silent, to provide few details, to leave the image to the task of telling his way and the spectator what to question or simply surrender to it.

This incessant pilgrimage in the same places until gradually becoming his (“Many of them, as if I could enter the scene at any time, are my home and the refuge of my dreams”), always looking for a subtle link that allows the reorganization of the apparent chaos of these stages, of these meetings, perhaps a continuous attempt to provide answers to those questions and all those small tragedies that afflict our existence, such as death or loneliness, but at the end, in the poetry of the image, we are content to contemplate as fascinating phenomena, perhaps finding, for a moment, a little peace.

JM Ramirez-Suassi (1970) was born in Mallorca (Spain), and now lives and works in Madrid. His work occupies an ambiguous position somewhere between portraiture and social landscape, involving multiple visits to the same locations to observe the change year after year.