Ramirez’s Poignant Sculptures Cut Straight to Heart of Matters

Through just three works commissioned over the last five years, Marcos Ramirez (who also goes by the name ERRE) has established himself as one of the region’s most eloquent sculptors of and in public space.

First, there was the scrap wood and corrugated metal shack that Ramirez, who was born and lives in Tijuana, erected on the plaza of the Centro Cultural there for inSITE94, a binational festival of site-specific sculpture. He followed that blunt crystallization of the condescending politics of art tourism with another searing work for inSITE97. His huge, two-headed Trojan horse, elegantly built in wood lattice, stood just a breath from the border, parked on a median strip among cars idling in the line to enter the U.S.

Infiltration--economic and cultural--works both ways, Ramirez’s sculpture asserted, stoically and slyly.

Now, as part of his exhibition “Amor Como Primer Idioma” (Love as First Language) at the downtown location of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Ramirez has again charged an outdoor site with edgy symbolism. “Acorazado,” a 14-foot-high heart clad in gray camouflage-patterned aluminum panels, sits on a wedge of pavement between trolley tracks and car traffic. Like Ramirez’s other sculptures, it packs an immediate visual punch but doesn’t stop there. Playing off the Spanish words coraza (armor) and corazon (heart), Ramirez’s work surges with multiple, simultaneous meanings having to do with the personal dynamics of love and vulnerability, as well as with cultural confrontations inherent in any border region.

Several narrow, grilled slits at eye level afford a dim view inside the heart, where Ramirez has, according to accompanying text, placed a single chair. Military implications are unavoidable: The heart has the bulk and protective armor of a tank, and its presence is oddly menacing. But there is also something poignant about this clunky form, this bittersweet memorial to the heart, engine of physical life, symbolic source of emotional life. The soft, pliable, pumping organ has gone hard and gray, become an empty shell.

Our first language is love, Ramirez writes in a short bedtime fable posted in the museum--”one common and unpronounceable language . . . a language that did not need words or signs, only glances and caresses.” Only after we, as individuals and as a species, acquired words did we lose trust in our senses and grow conscious of our differences.

Ramirez’s work, inspired by the passage last year of Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education initiative, is an appeal to return to the heart, our universal native language. It’s an endearing, earnest and valid plea to strip down to the essentials when we gaze across a border, to see the fundamental sameness of humans on either side. Our hearts are all of the same color, Ramirez reminds us.

Inside the museum lies another huge heart, this one constructed of rusting iron bars. A metal pallet with pillow and thin blanket hangs inside it, suspended by chains. While the skin of this heart is permeable, the sculpture is no less fraught with contradiction than the other. It is a place of forced solitude, but as much a sanctuary as a cell, as much meditation chamber as cage, as private as it is exposed.

Two more installations by Ramirez in the museum’s upstairs gallery incorporate words, or at least letters, and, ironically, have far less visceral power than the works below. One comprises a large wall of rusting metal with the words “Lengua Para Expresarnos/Corazon Para Comprendernos” (Language to Express Ourselves/Heart to Understand Each Other) written in a fluid, wrought-iron script. Water drips from a frame over the words and into a trough below. Even these few words feel overstated compared to the urgency of Ramirez’s purely visual work. For “Las Ruinas de Babel” (The Ruins of Babel), Ramirez has arranged, a bit too carefully, a jumble of letters in various alphabets on a bed of sand. The mute remains of language pool there, tangible punishment for our arrogant ambitions.

Trained as a lawyer, Ramirez dares to be sentimental in the face of the fearful, divisive rhetoric that defines the border region. It is through sentiment that we connect to one another, not through speech, he writes, that gift from a playful God to ensure that we wouldn’t understand each other. The heart has been a densely freighted icon for centuries and an inspirational guide for even longer. Ramirez shows, with utter humanity, that it cannot be exhausted.

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* Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1001 Kettner at Broadway, downtown San Diego, (619) 454-3541, through July 18. “Acorazado” will remain outdoors on the museum’s south plaza for an extended period.