Retrospective of Gabriel Ramírez Aznar, More Than the ‘Mexican Matisse’

‘Gesto y color: El legado de Gabriel Ramírez Aznar’ is a fiery retrospective of Yucatán’s most uncompromising artistic voice. For 60  years, Ramírez (Mérida, 1938) has built a body of work that pulses with violent contrasts, abstract explosions of color, and an unrelenting dedication to craft. The exhibition presents 50 oil and acrylic works that trace the journey of this self-taught painter, film historian, writer, and key figure of Mexico’s Generación de la Ruptura.

At 17, Ramírez left for Mexico City, where he discovered his visual vocation through cinema and the emotional, nature-filled impressionism of Vincent van Gogh. “I can’t tell anyone, ‘Go paint,'” Ramírez reflects from his Itzimná home. “You have to want it for yourself. No one teaches you — you learn by painting.” His early attempts were disastrous. He laughs remembering a botched portrait of Beníto Juárez,  but by 1965, he was exhibiting at Galería Juan Martín and co-founding the seminal Salón Independiente in 1968.

The urban chaos of Mexico City launched his career, but Yucatán’s light has sustained his creative engine for six decades. “The peninsula’s landscapes are my home and creative source,” says the artist whose work captures the dramatic play of tropical light with furious rhythms and sharp intersections of color. His brushstrokes build reliefs, islands, cells — entire landscapes that translate an inner voice “stained in yellow, submerged in red.”

Ramírez first made waves beyond Mexico in 1972 with “Latin American Painting Today” at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York. This pivotal exhibition introduced U.S. audiences to the vitality of post-muralist Mexican art. European recognition followed in 1978 when his work appeared in “Art from Mexico” at London’s prestigious Institute of Contemporary Arts, alongside Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo.

In 1997, Paris’ Maison de l’Amérique Latine hosted “Ramírez Aznar: Traces of Light”, a solo exhibition that cemented his reputation as “the Mexican Matisse” (Le Monde). More recently, his paintings joined the 2017 “Rupture and Continuity” survey at Miami’s Pérez Art Museum, contextualizing his radical 1960s experiments within global modernism.

“Gesture and Color” reveals Ramírez’s sustained contemplation of sunlight’s nuances on reality. Each painting becomes a window into his worldview – not hopeful or despairing, but persistently creative. “Painting is reason for being,” says the artist who rejects fleeting trends. When asked if he was satisfied with his work during a Modern Art Museum exhibition, he famously replied: “Of course not. I wish I could paint like Monet or Matisse. But I paint like Ramírez. It’s a tragedy.”

This honesty defines his approach. He scoffs at contemporary “farces” – “bananas taped to walls worth millions” – insisting painting is demanding labor: “You rise at dawn with your bread, paint until sunset, eat potato soup and sleep.” Though at 86, he admits his strength wanes, his final 2024 work will appear in the exhibition.

Karla Berrón Cámara, Mérida’s Director of Identity and Culture, praises Ramírez’s generosity in sharing his legacy. The exhibition offers more than art — it’s a portal to 60 years of Yucatán’s light, tradition, and beauty as filtered through one of Mexico’s most important artistic voices. As Ramírez says, “If painting makes you happy, do it. If not, don’t bother trying.”

The exhibition also includes several artifacts from Ramirez’s long career, including old photographs of the artist at his home, out and about, and at the openings of other exhibitions. Other items include pamphlets and brochures promoting shows, some of which are works of art in and of themselves, serving as a visual time capsule of the time, place, and context for which they were created.  

Aside from the extensive collection of works and artifacts, which takes up three exhibition rooms, the recent remodeling of the Olimpo cultural center serves as the perfect venue for this exhibit, with its new open-door policy out onto the balcony, which beautifully brings into frame Mérida’s Plaza Principal.

Gabriel Ramírez’s exhibition, which opened earlier this month at Mérida’s Olimpo Cultural Center, will continue until December 2025. Admission is free and open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.