Theo Meranze on love and dissolution in Rodrigo Ramírez Rodríguez’s latest exhibition.
It’s important for me, at the beginning of this piece, to confess that I love the artist whose show I’m writing about, Rodrigo Ramírez Rodríguez. In this spirit, I think it’s important for me to confess, too, that he and I are ongoing collaborators, and that we and our respective romantic partners, Karla Ekaterine Canseco and Carlin Faucett, collaborated on a collection of collages as an auxiliary part of said show, though I won’t get to that until later. I say this all not only in the spirit of honesty, but because it embodies one of the key throughlines of Rodrigo’s recent solo exhibition at Murmurs Gallery in Los Angeles, Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair: the viscerally generative nature of intimacy.
I met Rodrigo after profiling his partner Karla – an incredible artist herself – for this magazine. Karla and I had an immediate connection, one which led me to visit her in Mexico City, where she lives, and where Rodrigo is from. It was there that I was introduced to Rodrigo, whom I also felt an instant connection with. Over the following years, our connections grew into close friendships and an artistically collaborative relationship, one which has irrevocably changed my work and perspective. I wrote about all of this in An All-Devouring Oneness, a book of my poetry and prose in conversation with Rodrigo’s paintings and ideas that we made in conjunction with his previous exhibition, By Abrasion or Contagion, which took place last November at Bodega OMR in Mexico City.
Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair has been called a sequel to By Abrasion or Contagion, and I agree with this description. By Abrasion or Contagion was an expression of Rodrigo’s broader way of seeing: a perspective rooted in approaching matter, and subsequently the world, as an interconnected organism constantly devouring and regurgitating itself. In this sense, Rodrigo is interested in deconstructing the notion of the human as an isolated subject in his art, viewing people and their bodies as parts of an organistic whole, rather than singular, divorced agents of their own free will.
His paintings and sculptures, fleshy bodies and beings which dance and dissipate into each other, sit in between the figurative and the abstract. According to Rodrigo, they exist in a transient space internal to matter itself, propelled by desire into the chaos of its constant rebirth. During our preliminary conversations for our book, he told me that, when thinking about the nature of his work, he is partial to the Spanish term coined by writer Zenia Yebenez: nervios derramados, which roughly translates to “spilled nerves.”
Rodrigo’s perspective is an examination of Being with deeply political implications. Through it, he’s able to respond to the brutality of our world without reifying it in his art. I delved into this in our book, specifically in the context of our collectively fraught relationship to images of violence in an era of barbarism:
An unending consistency of horror is the reality of history and of our present moment. Images of mass violence decompose into fragmented impressions on the surface of a frenzied mind. And though what finalized horrors grow from the seeds of this phenomenon have not fully arrived, we already see its effects: mass destruction and mass numbness – many have become jagged edges in the smoothness of their coalescence. To create art that avoids amplifying this violence while revealing the possibility of its transcendence is a challenge of generational urgency. Rodrigo’s work achieves this.
Matter is unchanging in that it is constantly changing, contorting and shoving itself through what we call time. This truth bleeds through the canvas of our world’s violences: Colonial inheritances, failing neoliberalism, and encroaching genocidal fascisms. Rodrigo’s explorations are rooted in this understanding. Don’t let their amorphousness lead you to believe they are running from the world. Quite the opposite.
The images in this text are echoes of the indiscernible. They gut and display our shared darkness without augmenting its horrors. And in an era defined by image-induced numbness there is something vital about this attempt. Within its subtle mysticism lies something sacred – an understanding beyond what pure language or representation can describe: a kind of music.
Later in the text, I explore this way of seeing in relation to the anti-fascist nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal”:
“To become is not to progress or regress along a series,” say Deleuze and Guattari in ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’, a section of their text A Thousand Plateaus. Rather, becoming is a process which exists outside the bounds of what we perceive ourselves and our world to be, beyond our attachments to our notions of individual personhood, and ultimately, outside of our understanding of what it means to be human. Such a shift can’t be quantified by dogmatic ideas of political, personal, or metaphysical “progress,” hence its anti-fascist quality. To embody this would be in part what it means to, in their words, become-animal, or become a becoming-animal. Yet there’s a catch: “If becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself.”
In this apparent paradox lies the core of their idea. To say that becoming only produces itself is to proclaim its inherent nature, to proclaim the fluid nature of all things. It is in many ways an epistemological critique, one that destroys our learned tendency to attach fixed meanings to objects and others – our propensity to categorize. This is, after all, a large part of neoliberalism and political violence: the thing-ification of the other, and resultantly, the thing-ification of oneself. Yet the constancy of becoming is also a physical reality. All objects we consider to be independent are physically interrelated in the cannibalistic organism of matter that we call our world. We can only perceive their flesh. At closer glance they are what we in the last century have deemed “atoms,” “energy,” “quanta,” or whatever other definition we invent to describe the vibrating rhythms of the imperceivable. The nature of Rodrigo’s work communicates this deeper reality well: “Becoming produces nothing other than itself.”
When this way of seeing is channelled through Rodrigo’s practice, its mysticism emerges, one rooted in the way the desiring-body and its caverns of sensation can help us contact the cadences of such liberating chaos. In his words, “To have a sensation is to become aware of the immediacy of our skin in relation to the world. It is a space of perception where there is no language to name what affects us; where the body becomes an infinite surface, indistinguishable from the world and from time itself.” And while sublime, this process can also bring about internal resistance. “There are many moments when we wish not to lose what we believe we possess when we imagine we have attained certainty about the world,” Rodrigo says, “or about the knowledge and information we have constructed around it. Yet desire pushes us toward becoming lost.”
Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair took this perspective and focused it on intimacy. In the words of the artist, “I was interested in how beautiful and terrifying intimacy is, how through it you can dissolve yourself into another person.” In this sense, he was attempting to approach love as an emancipating death: “Death is the space in which we merge with the whole. Perhaps love resembles death insofar as both involve a process of inhabitation and contagion, a form of philia. Death is never an ending; it is a collision with an infinite and immeasurable extension from which there is no return.”
The exhibition was perhaps Rodrigo’s most immersive and cinematic body of work yet. Its sense of place was palpable, organized by churning beings in oil paintings, sculptures that appear like resin-coated cocoons, and a large number of metallic wall-works which implode into something in between the two, bathed in dim light. In the proposal for the show, Rodrigo described its world as a primordial space where birth explodes out of the materiality of desire into time: “Perception is a transition between two forces recognizing each other; it’s a relationship with two or more forces, the (in)differ-entiation between you and me, between my body and the outside – a time opens. Longing is the first force that exists in the deepest of time because it tears bodies and molecules into undifferentiation. When time begins, all bodies tear endlessly. We must imagine matter becoming the whole universe from nothing. This is where we become undifferentiated with the night, with others, and where time devours and dissolves what we name us.”
A piece in the show which communicated this well was From the glance, your breath is my breath, a large painting which sat at the far end of the exhibition. In it, a being disintegrates into the momentum of a blood-stained cyclone which leads back into its fragmented body. To me, the painting feels like an exploration of the paradoxical nature of desire. Amidst its sublimity, I sense the gut-wrenching nature of sex, a movement through which, when enraptured with desire, we are made whole through that which tears us apart.
At times, the works of Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair appear to be attempting to escape themselves, such as That’s what wanting love is: Her arms across me, a wall-work whose musculature appears frozen in a moment of lustful explosion, or That’s what wanting love is: The blood veins eyes vanish, a wall-work that, in Karla’s words, feels like a portal to something’s insides which are about to burst out at you.
While there was a sense of violence at play in the show, I didn’t think it was one which was brutal or self-indulgent. Rather, within the exhibition lay an exploration of an inherent violence and its productive capabilities – what Fred Moten, in an interview with the Michigan Quarterly Review, described as a violence which “(is) a function of love. But there is no denying that it’s destructive. There is no denying that it’s disruptive, there is no denying that it leaves nothing intact. Or no. Let me say that in a little bit more precise way: There is no denying that there’s no thing it leaves intact.”
The revelatory, anti-fascist nature of Rodrigo’s work spills out of such a disruptive love, driven by how the desire inevitably generates emancipatory possibilities. After all, it’s often in love that we first begin to realize we’re being inescapably submitted to such a force of change. And I think the viewer, when faced with the momentum of Rodrigo’s images, may experience a similar kind of revelation through their channelling of its expression.
In this respect, Rodrigo’s ongoing experiments with material and sculpture are driven by a longing to commune with the living histories of the materials he works with, and their affective possibilities: “I think about the time contained within a hundred-year-old door, the abandoned building from which it came, the light that passes through the works. Time and chronology collapse when we no longer center our point of view on what we call the Self. Layers of the past continue to sediment and sediment. How does metal feel? Or what is a metallic affect, a luminous affect? The show asks about forms of sensibility and affect that occur beyond the human.”
The experience of such an affective communion, one that pushes beyond the hubris of our fantasy of a singular perspective, was expressed through the sensation of rapid movement in Rodrigo’s show. It makes sense then that the moving image lurked everywhere in Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair. Like his pieces, it almost felt as if his exhibition itself was trying to erupt into the realm of cinema, impelled by the dispersed energy of its lighting and the velocity of its artworks in conversation with one another.
In Cause Nothingness was Somethingness – a five-painting series which seeks to embody film stills – constant transformation is present: a figuratively inclined body sits in a trance before falling to the floor and wilting into swaying blackness. The former movement, located in the fourth painting in the series, reminded me of James Baldwin’s proclamation in his essay about his friend and mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney, that: “Though black had been described to me as the absence of light, it became very clear to me that if this were true, we would never have been able to see the color, black: the light is trapped in it and struggles upward, rather like grass pushing up through the cement.” In the fifth and final piece of the series, its subject flowers into borderline abstraction, reborn as a womb-like being whose intestinal appendages fell out of the canvas and into the open space of the gallery.
For Rodrigo, collaboration is an inherent aspect of such continual rebirth and art-making itself. Even when painting, a process which he undertakes in isolation, the artist says there’s a collaboration with the materials at play: “I feel like there’s a collaboration with light, with pigments, resin, time, et cetera. They also teach us. I mean, it’s challenging, because usually it’s not possible to let them talk. Usually it’s the “Self” and the authority of consciousness who speaks.”
Around a month before the opening of Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair, Rodrigo asked me and Carlin to collaborate on a series of collages with him and Karla. Given the exhibition’s thematic focus on intimacy, it felt serendipitous that two couples with longstanding relationships to each other were in the position to make something together.
The process was simple: we all collected images and text which we felt related to the themes of Rodrigo’s show and watched a short film, Outer Space by Peter Tscherkassky, that inspired some of Rodrigo’s ideas for the exhibition. Then, we brought them to Karla’s house and enjoyed ourselves, continuously tearing apart and remaking each other’s images which cover and uncover each other like memory flashes. Much like in Rodrigo’s show, the space which the collages embody is generated by the explosive movement of intimacy. Together they form a 27-page zine named after the day it was conceived, 5/14/26, which Murmurs Gallery printed.
While it was made in just a day, the zine’s density is composed of years of exchanges between friends, collaborators, and romantic partners. It is a document of our process of thinking and living together, expressed in a moment of experimental play. In this sense, its process-oriented approach embodies Rodrigo’s ideas about intimacy, particularly its emancipating capability to birth through a process of disintegration. The rare, childlike excitement of making was present in the zine’s inception, and I think that comes across in its images. I certainly hadn’t felt the way I did that day for quite some time.
In an era where our capacity for feeling continues to wither under the weight of our world’s barbarisms, exploring how the deconstructive current of desire – no matter how we may try to defend ourselves against it – can push us beyond, as Rodrigo put it, “what we name us,” feels incredibly important. Such birthing movement emanates from the artworks which composed Lonely Never Knows Jealousy, Only Despair. Consequently, I think they can push those who encounter them into the terrifying freedom of that which is felt but unknown, just as they have pushed me. And, as I’ve written many times in the past, I couldn’t be more grateful to Rodrigo for that.
