Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present CHUNK, a solo exhibition of Paul Henry Ramirez’s eagerly awaited paintings. Ramirez’s newest works make their first impression as products of a modernist history. His clean and dynamic abstractions nod to the monastic painterly pursuits of Mondrian, the utopian ethics of the Bauhaus and the formal rigor of the Constructivists. However, Ramirez’s work challenges and even violates the cool esthetics of Modernism through his playful, promiscuous style. As his paintings shed associations with abstraction, the human body begins to emerge. The shafts of color traversing his canvases read like directional marks tracing the frenetic movements of a cast of abstract characters. Forms that might otherwise be concrete become elastic and whimsical and in Ramirez’s hands like dancers moving to his choreography.

CHUNK, Paul Henry Ramirez’s fourth exhibition at Caren Golden Fine Art, expands on his previous work by zooming deeper inside his signature vocabulary – suggestive body parts, shocks of swirling hair-like brush marks and pools of rich color. These stunning new works are based on Ramirez’s evaluation and reduction of his work over the past decade. As a result, Ramirez’s forms have become more structural and angular, integrating the individual elements into a single, interrelated system. Bold fields of color in each painting function as “skins” to encase the formal elements while being squeezed, cut and stretched themselves. This dynamic relationship destabilizes the stage and activates the characters that move upon it. The tension delivered from this figure/ground ambiguity has allowed Ramirez to pare down the content without compromising its dramatic effects.