Ramón Williams. Undercurrent Arts Wynwood Art District, Miami

May 10th - May 31st, 2008

In his solo exhibition “Trace Crop Off,” Ramón Williams assembles a flowing selection of his most recent works, resulting in a project of almost symphonic configuration that groups three different series into one with the interchangeable fluidity of I Ching hexagrams. “Trace Crop Off” is the trimming, the publication of an outline, an impression -or the clipping and reframing of the photograph of that outline. In this title, Williams, in a very natural way, is able to weave the technological jargon of digital imaging into the discourse of a certain philosophy of the image -namely, Jean-Luc Nancy and his seminal essay- while carefully maintaining the ambivalence of the enunciated phrase (cropping a trace off) and of each of its three words, which he uses as titles for the show’s three series, and which he analyzes separately in his introductory text.

These works simultaneously address the sight and the mind of the beholder. Seldom have the retinal and the conceptual conspired so closely in the search for that arduous state of grace that is aesthetic pleasure, and which in art is like a multifaceted orgasm -heuristic, ludic, informative, etc. It can arrive slowly in waves or instantaneously like the flick of a light switch in the midst of darkness. Reality underlies these photographs and objects like an ambiguous token or referent, behind which allusions to veiled referents (historic, artistic, advertising, religious or propagandistic) leap out like magic rabbits to be omnivorously digested daily by the contemporary eye.

Somewhere between the shame and the marketing of the local image, Williams’ photographs document absences (of buildings, of walls, of letters in neon signs that alter meanings in appalling or humorous ways); accidental or intentional operations that alter urban landscapes, evidence of or clues to the chaotic life which bustles within metropolitan confines -the megalopolis as the whale, the citizen as Jonah trapped in its belly for three days and three nights, a human lifetime in the chronometry of the cosmos; vestiges of a grisly number of automobile accidents occurring on expressway medians -which become the boundary between life and death; and compassionate coats of paint, which county road crews periodically apply to cover them up.

These photographs are like a chalkboard on which the artist inscribes the biography of two cities as close and as far removed as Havana and Miami, and it does not appear haphazard that the foundation for this project was written during a flight through the air corridor that links them, a gesture that tends to complete the alchemy of lights and shadows that forms the image. Ramón Williams’ proposal reaches beyond a geographic agenda, by being a metaphor for life and the world (or life in this world) marked by impermanence and change. This metaphor in Williams’ works reminds us that, in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, “The trace is the interminable passage from one disappearance to another. (…) The passage is interminable because it never really begins: things always leave something behind and nothing more…”

Notes

*NANCY, Jean-Luc. Traces, in Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation, edited by Naoki Sakai, Yukiko Hanawa, Hong Kong University Press, 2001 Pp. 110-112.