It was the encyclopedias on painting and sculpture that his parents got that first ignited a young Marcos Ramirez’s interest in visual arts. After earning a law degree in Mexico, then working construction in the United States for 17 years, he began creating art that went on display in exhibitions at galleries and museums. When he ed some artist friends on an exchange exhibition in Japan in 1991, his focus shifted.
“From that moment on, I decided that I wanted to dedicate myself to art,” he said via email. “I was seduced by what that profession offered, the possibility of expressing my ideas and emotions, and also traveling and learning about other cultures and different ways of seeing the world we live in.”
Ramirez, 63, creates under the name ERRE and has participated in lectures, solo and collective exhibitions, and residencies in the U.S., Mexico, all over Europe, South America and Asia. A multidisciplinary visual artist, he’s always looking for new materials with which to create his work, he says. In that work, he has a high regard for historical memory and ideas of peace, justice and freedom. His current exhibition, “Whites Always Move First,” is on display at Quint ONE, located at Bread & Salt in Logan Heights, through Jan. 4. This installation features a concrete chess board (he’s used the game of chess to comment on geopolitical conflict before) with bombs, bullets and missiles in place of traditional chess pieces. There’s also a large identification sheet where the information on the pieces appears and a series of fabric banners of different colors referring to the most common colors of various national flags.
“The title is, in a strict way, the opening rule of the game of chess; in a more relaxed way, it is an obvious analogy between that rule and the privileges that colonizing European countries, as well as imperialist and expansionist countries, have had over dominated or weaker cultures for centuries,” he says.
Ramirez, who lives in Oceanside, spent about four years finishing this installation and took some time to talk about this latest work. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this interview, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/author/lisa-deaderick/.)
Q: How did you go about conceptualizing “Whites Always Move First”? What inspired this take on a game of chess?
A: The chess board represents a miniature world where pieces confront each other with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the opponent’s king. It is a game that is believed to have originated in India in the sixth century and whose current rules were established in Europe. It is also a game where the white piece always plays first, granting (according to some criteria) a slight advantage to the player when the players are of similar talent or ability. This is a rule that was established in 1880 in the Chess Code of Laws, that the right to the first move must be determined by lot and that the player who wins said initial toss must always play with white. There are various rumors that the reason for this rule is due to racism, but, although this cannot be stated 100%, let us that we are talking about the 19th century, where Europeans generally did not consider Africa a place of civilization and in a time where there was a lot of abuse and dehumanization of Whites toward Blacks. And, the color white was commonly associated with good and the color black with bad.
I think things haven’t changed much; the white pieces continue to open the game as a rule. There are still advantages and disadvantages in the game and my piece is no exception, although my pieces do not necessarily have those colors.
Q: What did you want to say through this particular work?
A: I think that what I want to say with the piece should manifest itself in the reading of each of the viewers who come to the exhibition and have the opportunity to look at it in the exhibition space.
I am not a writer, nor is my work about influencing the viewer with rigid explanations. I only do half of the work — the viewer always completes the piece and by then, the dialogue. It is that exercise of communication and exchange with the viewer that interests me, not the imposing of my dogmatic and personal way to think.
Q: Can you walk us through some of your thinking in your selection of materials? Why the use of missiles and bullets? The specific flags and the countries they represent?
A: Explaining the formal part, I have always had a taste for certain materials, and wood is one of them, therefore, all of the chess pieces are made of turned and polychrome wood. Some have aluminum applications to give them the faithful shape of missiles and bombs with a more sophisticated design. While some are copies of historical designs, others are a little more the result of my creative freedom. The tabletop is made of concrete and fulfills two functions: one is that it operates as a table, but also as a building with a brutalist appearance, representative of an era that corresponds in architecture to the decades in the early- and mid-20th century. These are decades in which the development of more advanced weapons, both nuclear and conventional, proliferated. Still talking about concrete as a chosen material for this work, I believe that when it appears in a rustic form it can also have a reading that resembles ruin and destruction.
The traditional black and white on the board, for my taste, is not necessary in this multi-read location surface I designed as a chess board. Those colors (of the flags), by the way, are usually shared by several countries, so we see them in different combinations, with different designs, and in a variety of tones. Russia’s blue is not the same as ’s blue, or the United States’ blue, or Israel’s blue, for example. Nor is the same green in the flags of Mexico, Brazil, Palestine or Iran; however, all of these use green, coincidentally. This is a very heraldic art piece, we could say.
Q: This work was installed during our most recent presidential election in November. I’m curious about what’s been going through your mind since the results of that election and an second Trump istration.
A: That was the time when the exhibition was offered to me and it seemed like the right time to show this work. These topics that I deal with are cyclical and will, unfortunately, always be in the foreground.
The ghosts of nuclear war have accompanied me all my life. So, after the election – or within four, eight or 20 years – they will continue to be in force because, unfortunately, the vocation for war is rooted in humankind and especially in countries that use the exercise of force as a form of control in the geopolitical game.
Q: What do you hope the piece is able to say, or to prompt people to talk about, to think about?
A: I think the previous answers help to specify this last one – I want the piece to convey my concerns, to help us think and consider important issues in society and the world in which we live. Let everyone see it with their own eyes, enjoy it or endure it, and at the end draw their very own conclusions.
