El Carrusel, 2025
Lily Ramírez
In As We Read, two artists with unique approaches to abstract painting come together. It is through the differences in their individual practices that the ability of abstraction to transcend visuality and hold emotion, despite no clear subject, is demonstrated. While both Walker and Ramírez work in their own styles, their approaches to the genre demonstrate both the many interpretations of abstraction there can be, and the skilful way each artist utilises it.
The Mexican-American artist Lily Ramírez is known for her intensely textured and colourful abstract compositions, with a focus on small, overlapping brushstrokes. Ramírez often talks about how maps, especially the Thomas Guides from the 1990s, played an essential role in forming how she saw and experienced her hometown, Los Angeles. El Carrusel demonstrates this influence in her work, where we see individually formed segments of the canvas, all connected by the flow of the marks that depict them. This separation between what we see from above and what we experience from below is inherent to her practice and her ongoing exploration of tension between abstraction and structure.
This tension is demonstrated in the texture of her works, with some works featuring brushstrokes coming up to 1cm away from the canvas. This use of impasto plays an interesting role within the carefully planned compositions and colour combinations, where it creates a second layer of abstraction beyond the small colourful brushstrokes. Nadien Como Tu demonstrates this perfectly – the colours create one composition, while the thickness and direction of her impasto create another. This contrast both in texture and the resulting difference in shape mirrors her experience of LA from the ground versus on a map, and this is how Ramírez imbues her works with an emotional and personal approach to structuring the world.
Ramírez also takes a different perspective on abstract painting through her titles, many of which help bring her works into the realm of landscapes and nature. Landscape With No Escape is one such work. While the composition is still typical of Ramírez (small brushstrokes, bright colours, very visible mark making), the title pushes the viewer’s understanding of her influences into a certain direction. The flowing layers of green, brown, blue, and yellow seem to almost depict a valley, with a winding river flowing towards the bottom of the canvas, and fields of yellow and pink flowers along the way. However, up-close the landscape illusion is gone, as the focus returns to each deliberately placed stroke.
Ellie Walker, a British artist who recently graduated from City & Guilds Art School, takes a very different approach in her abstraction. While Ramírez is inspired by the structure of aerial maps, Walker’s works feel much more emotive and personal in their mark making. Some of her works, especially the larger ones like All Pent Up, look like explosions of vibrant orange and pink paint, an energy she creates by working on the canvases from multiple angles and approaches. Her smaller pieces have more of a collage-like composition but are imbued with a sense of urgency and emotion through her treatment of the canvas – cutting apart and resewing multiple works together.
It is this destruction and construction that makes Walker’s style of abstract painting so unique. She doesn’t just take the painting of the canvas as the site of abstraction, but instead the entire materiality of her pieces are areas for potential destruction. I Think My Inner Romantic Died At Some Point is an excellent example of this, where Walker has not only used the diptych format as a way to physically break the piece in two, but has then attached a separate strip of painted canvas onto the frame of one half. The effect is a work that is broken up in colour composition, as well as physically, and the tension between two separately created works coming together on one frame is palpable.
Unlike Ramírez, who often connects her works to her inspiration through the titles, Walker’s give nothing away other than her own mindset in creating them. This furthers the abstraction in the works as they are separated not only physically, but they also remove from the viewer any ability to understand them in a specific, real-world setting. Works like Stubborn hint to the composition, with the pink and purple meeting in the middle at a stand-off, as though either colour is too stubborn to give way on the canvas. The Doubt Was Screaming At Me, So I Gave it the Middle Finger, however, demonstrates a composition as personal and emotional as the title itself.
As We Read is at RHODES until July 4th. Email us for more details.
