MILAN.- Meeting Duality is a show that brings together a body of work that explores the individual’s encounter with duality. In this context, duality is a way of thinking corresponding with a Maya tradition in which opposites become unified. Quite different from the Cartesian tradition, the unity of opposites in Maya thought takes places in the depths of an individual’s being in relation with that which takes place outside the self.

Based on this understanding of duality, the works in the current show take place on a metaphoric plane and themselves become metaphors which embody this duality. They are informed by the dreams and experiences of the artist during his time with the Häch Winik in the south of Mexico. The metaphor is extended further in the material creation of the pieces displayed: fire is an element which is both represented in the artworks and was elemental in their production: the fusion of dualities becomes both subject and object.

Both ceramics and paintings incarnate images which are the product of moments when the image has been reorganised. The processes of creation and destruction experienced by the artworks during their production resembles the nature of a Heraclitan dialectic, that is, as a union resulting from the tension between opposites. Fire forges the image, not only through the physical condition of wax and copal fused with pigments on the surface, but also altering the original image irretrievably while fixing it.

In the case of the ceramics, the fire that transforms the physical structure of clay and glaze in a process which purposely translates the materials from their ephemeral into a solid form submits the work to a moment of sacrifice. The sacrificial fire puts both ceramics and paintings to the ultimate test of their physical capacities: without fire the work would not come to be, but the fire risks their absolute destruction. The fusion of the possibility of creation and destruction is the ultimate duality embodied in the final, surviving work.

Fabian Ramírez (b.1994, Mexico City) completed his bachelor’s degree in visual arts at the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México (UNAM) from 2012 until 2016. In 2019, he began to study painting with Ellen Gallagher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Fabian Ramírez has won several prizes and also received the “Young Creators” grant of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA), Mexico City, in 2016. Since 2014, his work has been shown in international solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Mexico, the US and Australia. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.