Diego Ramírez
(b.1989, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)

Film credits
Diego Ramírez, The Perfect Ever (or how oil discovered humans), HD Video, 6:30min, 2021-23, sound by Bonnie Cummings. Courtesy of the artist and MARS Gallery.

Diego Ramírez is an artist, writer and facilitator who creates humorous objects in different mediums that evoke the post-Catholic concept of the ‘Fall’ and its melancholic, adversarial and supernatural relations. This interest extends to various romantic archetypes, such as the vampire, which he reconfigures to address issues of language and representation.

The Perfect Ever (or how oil discovered humans) (2021-23) carefully re-edits scenes from the Mexican film ‘Las Rosas del Milagro’ (‘The Miracle Roses’, 1960) to hijack the image of the Virgin Guadalupe with an eerie and viscous entity. The original film – acquired by the artist from a Catholic shop —tells the story of how Saint Diego encountered Mary. This work takes advantage of the rudimentary graphics of the source material, to explore the notion that speculative characters in Hollywood films resemble an audiovisual miracle by exceeding the reality of the set. Thus, Ramírez manufactures his own Capitalist marvel by radically shifting the narrative, to feature a human character lost in the hill, where he perpetually encounters a black and dripping orb across different locations. As the title suggests, Ramírez proposes this is the story of how oil discovered humans, endowing the substance with the desire to be worshipped. He achieves this effect by editing the original film down to the apparition scenes, eliminating dialogue and isolating the expressions of ‘awe’ performed by the actor. The result is what the artist describes as ‘an ambiguous and sinister mirage that points to the palpable yet comical darkness of a divinity briefly visiting Earth… Capitalism exceeds the reality of earth, it is a dark miracle’.

Ramírez’s work has been shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Westspace, and Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne; Human Resources Los Angeles; and Deslave, Tijuana. He has written for the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art + Australia, NECSUS, MeMO and un Projects. Ramírez completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University and an honours degree in Fine Arts at Monash University. As a facilitator, he is the Director at SEVENTH Gallery and sits on panels for Creative Victoria and the City of Melbourne, and is a peer assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts. He is represented by MARS Gallery.

The Perfect Ever appeared in Community Hall on 5–11 Jun 2023.