Osvaldo Ramírez Castillo was born in 1978 in El Salvador, the city where he grew up until he was 11 years old. During the civil war that this country went through in the 1980s, his family decided to emigrate to Canada where he acquired his artistic training.

The foundations of his work were strongly marked by this experience of exile, which led him to seek critical dialogue with the past, trying to represent through the use of different media -such as drawing, engraving and video- that attitude that Walter Benjamin described how to “sift through history”, filter the facts with a critical eye from the present so that this story of loss and violence is not forgotten but does not prevent it from moving into the future.

His work also reflects on the historical-cultural intersections of indigenous and Christian iconography; of pop culture and pre-Columbian culture in Latin America, resulting in its own strong artistic language.

This project has been made possible thanks to the generous help of: Conseil des Artes et des Lettres, Quebec Canada Council for the Arts

ARTIST STATEMENT

Using drawing as a personal act of review, my work represents an allegorical narration of my own historical and cultural experiences. My artistic practice begins with the body as a symbol and a place where the collective and personal trauma originated in the memory of the experiences of loss and violence that marked El Salvador during the civil war in the 1980s. This period that we went through together with my family was the reason why we emigrated to Canada.

I have always felt linked to these experiences and I define my work as a critical dialogue with the past to which I submit to a constant historical review. My artistic approach is linked to the possibilities of the narrative, finding in myth and memory important tools for the exploration of Latin American mythology and folklore. My current artistic practice is particularly based on popular art forms that blend indigenous beliefs and tales with Christian ritual and iconography.

Similar aspects of pop culture-derived North American iconography, such as graffiti and poster art, consistently serve as meaningful frames which provide an aesthetic and political dimension to my work revolving around my visual rhetoric.

Using a personal lexicon of images that I have developed in my activity as an artist over the years results in a combination of drawing techniques that explore the problems of collective memory, cultural identity, and historical trauma