Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo: Ruins

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Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, "Naufragios," 2020

mixed media on Mylar, 27.5 x 78 inches

‘Ruins’ is a series of mixed media drawings that describe an ongoing process of reconciliation with tragedy by recounting individual experience and revising collective memory within the legacy and impact of the Salvadoran Civil war.

In these recent works, historical trauma and catastrophe are mediated by reconfiguring notions of re-growth, renewal, and healing through personal myth-making. Working from a variety of historical, cultural, and political references, hybrid images are created by revising pre-Hispanic storytelling, cosmology, Salvadoran popular folklore, and iconography sourced from Western art history.

Originally from El Salvador, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo immigrated to Canada at age eleven. He is a graduate of The Ontario College of Art and Design (2001) and obtained his MFA at Concordia University in 2008. He has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally in venues such as The International Print Centre in New York (2008), The Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2011), Montréal, arts interculturels (2012), The Mexic-Arte museum in Austin, Texas (2012), La Halle Saint Pierre in Paris (2019), and most recently at Marte-Museo de Arte de El Salvador in San Salvador.

Castillo’s studio practice is focused on individual and collective histories, issues of migration, violence, and inter-generational knowledge filtered through the possibilities of personal myth. As a Latin-American artist, his research and art production also investigates the cultural intersections between local indigenous storytelling and cosmology as modes of political expression, resurgence, and memory construction. His body of work explores multi-media approaches to drawing which involve traditional printmaking methods, stop-motion animation, and installation.