Review: While Being Plasmic Membranes
Rodrigo Ramírez, While Being Plasmic Membranes, installation view. Photo by Cary Whittier. Courtesy of the artist and Swivel Gallery.
At Swivel Gallery, Rodrigo Ramírez Rodríguez’s solo exhibition titled While Being Plasmic Membranes dissects the corporeal in a way that resists anthropocentrism. In exploring metamorphosis as a sociological, anatomical, and philosophical constant, the artist suspends clarity of meaning while grappling with the impossibility of representation when the line between bodyhood and objecthood is infinitely blurred.
Unified by a fleshy color palette, the paintings on view oscillate between fantasy and morbidity, evoking the silhouettes of carcasses or internal organs while maintaining gesture and abstraction in their rendered state. Rodríguez cites the 2022 film, The Fabric of the Human Body (De humani corporis fabrica), as a source of inspiration for the exhibition. Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, the film showcases footage of surgical procedures, anatomical rawness, and conversations in hospital waiting rooms that, right off the screen, seem to reek of the scent of chlorine. The viewer is afforded an uncanny proximity to blood vessels, membranes, skin, and filaments, assuming a vantage point of an alien object. From there, the body becomes material, unfamiliar, and contentiously secular.
Rodrigo Ramírez, A Change That Yields Easy Separation (2025). Oil, acrylic, pastels, and charcoal on linen. 79 H x 63 W x 1 D in. Courtesy of the artist and Swivel Gallery.
Rodríguez also considers Gilbert Simondon’s “The Genesis of the Individual,” which proposes the individual as a process rather than a fixed, delineated entity. The concept seeps into the exhibition through each shape's morphing, organic outlines. Like many other works in the show, A Change That Yields Easy Separation (2025) invites speculations around what the title might mean. I associate the title and therefore the image with some form of excarnation ritual, where soft tissues like ligaments are removed from bones. Others may see multiple ears entangled together because of the spiral curvatures. An element of uncertainty is ever-present, and these wall-hung images feel alive and haunting at the same time. Ramírez has mobilized bodies’ deep interiority to solicit a feeling of discomfort—discomfort with a self-contained system gashed open, with the instability of figure-ground relationships, with the perpetuated state of unknowing, and with the concurrence of life and decay.
Rodrigo Ramírez, Something Outgrown; An Injured Secret Of Minds I (2025). Steel, resin, beeswax, wire mesh, concrete, paper, Fresnel lens, and lab clamps. 51 H x 39 W x 36 D in. Courtesy of the artist and Swivel Gallery.
Many of Rodríguez’s sculptural pieces are placed below eye level, featuring Fresnel lenses fixed to the steel structures with lab clamps. The lenses themselves are razor-thin, yet they seem to be warped in a curved, protruding way—like an elongated egg or a dew drop on the verge of dripping off and submitting itself to the dubious force of gravity. The “flesh” of the sculptures is an eclectic concoction of resin and beeswax, which forms a strange texture that appears stone-like from afar and has a texture similar to dry-aged steak upon touch. They look into futurity, as ongoing dehydration of the material will harden the surfaces even more. Each piece has morphed as a result of prolonged existence and will become even more mummified during what can be read as an elaborate metaphor for aging and afterlife. Steel rods with sharpened ends penetrate these sculptures, resembling a larger-than-life suture needle while simultaneously evoking the semblance of architectural detritus. The forms turn and collapse onto themselves, somehow making me think of Möbius strips, elusive in their directionality without definite origins or ends. There’s violence; there’s immense viscerality; there’s also ambiguity pointing towards the infinite.
Rodrigo Ramírez, While Being Plasmic Membranes, installation view. Photo by Cary Whittier. Courtesy of the artist and Swivel Gallery.
The parable of the blind men and the elephant states that different entry points yield different conceptualizations of the bigger picture. Rodríguez, likewise, carries out a thorough investigation of the fallacy behind the quest for wholeness, not just of perception but also of existence itself. In the exhibition’s interrogation of embodiment as a proxy of bio-social presence, there’s an attempt to capture the transmutation of form and of never-ending becoming.
Rodrigo Ramírez Rodríguez: While Being Plasmic Membranes is on view at Swivel Gallery from March 29th to April 26th, 2025.
