SANDRA SOSA: RESTE VON RESTEN [LEFTOVERS]
Alfredo Ramos has been working with detritus for some time. That set of silver prints on gelatin documented the walls – ‘the tiles’ – of his photographic lab [Vestiges, 2005], capturing random things with the photographic medium. There is some tautology in this ‘ground lifting’, which later included the accident, the error, the residue of chemical reactions thrown away [Studies for Vestiges, 2008-2011]. The ‘dark room’ and everything that participates in its physicality became an object of representation, without losing its capacity as an instrument of expression. The point of departure is that marginalized creation zone that compromises itself as part of contingency, trial and error, and which material proof is considered useless. By recycling its weaknesses, the artist offers an abstract and [un-]real document where photography and art, speak of themselves and their process.
In his latest series Reste von Resten [2017] Ramos transcends the private space. They are snapshots of that perimeter that every one prefers to make invisible: the dumpster. While there is a type of artistic production whose components ‘come’ literally from the trash [Trash Art, Junk Art, or the English version Art Bin], in this case the dumpster becomes as a pretext for a visual poetry of the urban landscape. The photograph materializes a displacement on the useless character of the objects, due to the loss of its original function, which deactivates by an aesthetic decision. The framing of each image, its composition, the angle, the type of light that surrounds it, is a testimony of the real that predisposes to the fragment becomes abstract, absurd, even pictorial; perhaps a representation of a representation. The nature of this movement is mental; recycling and resurrection of a reality and its objects, subsumed, defenestrated, and castrated by the accelerated obsolescence that dominates contemporary life.
Sandra Sosa (Cuban Curator and Art Critic), Havana, 2017