RAMÓN MIRANDA BELTRÁN ‘We are dust’

In tune with the fresh Latin American tradition, which is approximately fifty years old –since the sixties onwards–, and maybe influenced by the success of the Cuban Revolution and its sociologically populist «iconographic mark», Latin American photography as become an instrument for reflection, a tool to analyze reality. Before our searching eyes, it displays the subversive narratives that lay beneath the outer skin of the image. It is precisely there, in what is subcutaneous, in what lies under the photosensitive film or the planimetrics of the photo, that the Puerto Rican artist Ramón Miranda Beltrán finds «something to say»… by un-saying what has been said before, with a clearly revisionist purpose. Rather than siding with the «objectual trend» of Latin American photography that precedes him, Ramón Miranda feels more affinity for the «neo-historicist approach» of the new art coming from the Americas, where we can count such outstanding figures as Rosângela Rennó, Carlos Garaicoa and Allora & Calzadilla –all of them artists who have a causal relationship with photography in the sense of «typical archive».

For Ramón Miranda, this idea of «typical archive» makes it possible to exercise a critical attitude of direct research towards the image. Rather than approaching it as cult iconography, he sees the opposite: icons that can be destroyed, replaced, brought together and decomposed, and eventually redone. At this point, RMB embarks on a journey of objectual radicalization that is directly connected to sculpture. Thus, the artist begins his works by consolidating fragmentary layers / plates of molten cement (=concrete) and, by doing so, confronts us with the juxtaposed repetition of collective notions that superimpose, overlay, cross out, hide and forget one another. But the aim of Miranda’s art is bringing everything into light –a very photographic attitude indeed– as in a perfect metaphor of the work of a historian, a philosopher or a social science researcher when they disclose some precious piece of information or a revealing, radical and revolutionary conclusion.

Miranda’s work could be described as organised around a critical, direct point of view; head-on, blunt, refusing any craftiness or protocol, with a certain venomous aftertaste that works as a vaccine against the disease of capitalist decadence, the system and its struggles for real power. The artist’s perspective advocates differences and the human ability to resettle before power from a fortified spot. This spot is a place where we can use our memory as a bulwark to protect ourselves against everything that might threaten our freedom, even the law, used by power to compel the civil life of ordinary citizens. And it is precisely in this ordinary citizen sphere where Miranda’s work becomes the ground, the column, the wall and the building that dominate a new territory. This is no other than the territory of a free person, who, neverheles, is not bound to it by any deed of ownership. And it is precisely that freedom that turns the person into dust: an elementary particle that floats and flies around, and is meant to escape from every cage.

IMAGE GALLERIES

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