In this text, Colombian art critic Camilo Calderón (b. 1941) quite accurately asserts that “all of the work [by Colombian artist Ramírez Villamizar (1922–2004)] from the sixties could be seen as the search for spatiality in volume and in hollows.” In 1956, Ramírez Villamizar made his first relief: a small-format construction in wood that was painted white. That same year, he made Composición en Ocres [Composition in Ochres], the first abstract mural in Colombia; that work was commissioned for the offices of the Bavaria Brewery in Bogotá. By then, Ramírez Villamizar was an important representative of geometric abstraction on the local art scene; his paintings with flat color planes and geometric shapes were known throughout the country. At this stage, the artist began to take an interest in volume, and by means of relief, he gradually shifted from painting to space. In the sixties, he pursued this line of production, building major works (murals in relief) for public spaces. Such works include: El Dorado [Golden] (1958) for the Banco de Bogotá; Mural Horizontal y Curvo [Horizontal Mural and Curve] (1964) for Luis Ángel Arango public library of Bogotá: Tres Relieves [Three Reliefs] (1967) for the American Bank in New York: and Serpiente Precolombina [Pre-Columbian Serpent] (1964) for the façade of the Lux soda factory in Cali, Colombia. This text, “Ramírez Villamizar: Escultura y Abstracción,” by Colombian art critic Camilo Calderón, is significant within the literature on this artist because it analyzes an important period of transition in Ramírez Villamizar’s work.
As Calderón describes, “The first reliefs exceeded the base surface by just a few centimeters. Gradually, there were more layers and greater thickness. That initial timidity gave way to openly grasping space and an ever-greater tendency to move away from the wall, creating undeniable inner spaces in the forms.” Calderón considers this period in Ramírez Villamizar’s production essential to understanding how his art developed. Experimentation and slow transformation provided his later sculptural work with solid conceptual and methodological grounding.
As he delved into the world of relief and later of sculpture, space became Ramírez Villamizar’s essential tool. Calderón demonstrates that Ramírez Villamizar’s work consists not only of the materials it uses (iron, wood, acrylic, clay, etc.), but also of the space that it occupies or acts on. Ramírez Villamizar states that “space is one of my objectives, but I approach it intuitively: I grasp on to some forms, meld them together, and relate them to others. Then they work their magic and allow me to seize the space, a beautiful space that can be walked through, lived in; a space that hovers around us. And I am full of joy, a sense of magic, at having been able to mold the space to such an extent that, at time, it prevails over form” [see “El sueño del orden,” doc no. 1092041].