Ramiro Martínez Plasencia

Ramiro Martínez Plasencia remembers as a child, his great fascination for the way in which drawings used to come to life in animated series, and his love for making drawings and creating his own personages that were inspired by tv documentaries about animation by artists such as Walter Lantz and Walt Disney. He also recalls creating his very own animated series on paper.

The artist was born in Mexico City, in 1963, but even before his first birthday, his family moved to Monterrey, where he studied architecture at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. After working for some years in a couple of architectural studios, Martínez Plasencia left architecture and returned to Mexico City where he enrolled in the master’s degree program for visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP). During the years of his postgraduate studies, he found himself in a stimulating environment in the drawing classes of Francisco Bravo, which returned him to his favorite medium: drawing. But even more so, it was in the production studio directed by the painter Ignacio Salazar, that Ramiro attended diligently between 1992 and 1995, that he found space for reflection and critique that allowed him to develop his unique form of approaching drawing and painting.

This steered him towards the rendering of scenes populated by personages from the animated stories of his childhood, but now they appear within contexts of violence or political and psychological instability that characterizes our current times. His works do not attempt to create a readable narrative in the way short stories do, rather they give birth to certain atmospheres and absurd situations that invite the public to create their own stories.

As of today, he has presented 1 solo exhibitions in México and the USA and has participated in numerous group shows, among them, the V and VII Bienal Diego Rivera; the II, III, V, VI and VIII Bienal Monterrey FEMSA; the VII, X and XI Bienal Tamayo, the IV Art Triennial of Majdanek in Poland, as well as Registro 02 (Museo MARCO, 2009).

He was awarded fellow of the Fonca Jóvenes Creadores Program in 1994 and 1997, artist in residence at the Xu Yuan Centre in Beijing (2014), and member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores (2015-2017). Since 1999, he lives and works in Santiago, Nuevo León