Artist Carlos Ramirez’s work is a multi-cultural mix of old and new, layered with socio-political ideas, street aesthetics, and pop iconography. After many years of collaborating and receiving international recognition as part of a duo The Date Farmers, Carlos is now forging a new chapter as a solo artist. Whether it’s painting a mural, working on “From Dream to Reality” with filmmaker Max Joseph, introducing new a body of work at galleries, doing an Art Residency at BedStuy in New York, or creating EP cover art for DNCE, at age 51 there’s no slowing down for Carlos Ramirez.

A Mexican-American, or Chicano, a kid in the 1970s and 80s, the artist says he remembers what he did when he has left alone while his mom worked as a migrant agricultural employee picking produce in the fields. He entertained himself with daydreams and games, sometimes played with other kids, and he drew. Discovering this innate attraction and possible talent, drawing would become an increased focus for him over time, eventually opening doors – even though friends and family didn’t necessarily think much of it then, or even now.

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The concepts of good and evil and an interest in spiritual or mystic topics all appear periodically in the conversation, like the cell phone videos of UFOs in the sky over his home in recent years, or his necklace orbs that represent the distance of the earth from the sun, and a recent mind-body-spirit experience he had in Brooklyn with his mate Jeannette at a “sound bath”.

The figures are dark, heavy, labored, square-shouldered, and square-jawed. Backgrounds are Mexican candy-colored pinks, yellows. The color contrast is emblematic of the lives of people he’s known in Mexico and those who have moved to the US; an insistence on optimism and humor in the face of institutionalized racism, social inequality, police abuse, and economic injustice. Again and again, he describes the ebullient sense of humor seen across the culture as a pragmatic tool for psychological and spiritual survival.

Carlos' works are layered reflections of a polymorphous identity; foreign yet familiar perspectives existing in a liminal reality between cultures, collecting ephemera and detritus and combining it into playful assemblage pieces. Ramirez’s work often speaks of the inequalities within Mexican American communities and often champions the common man as an underdog.

His work is tremendously resourceful, scavenging for creative materials within various desert locales. The work is replete with layers and textures intertwined with the political while being disguised as popular. Works include a combination of house paint, sparkly stickers, handwritten bilingual text, rusted bottle caps, discarded packaging, and iconic stylized use of acrylic paint with deeply layered figurative workings. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, and other bits of nature from his hometown appear mixed in with Catholic symbolism, aliens, perceived gang members, pop-culture references, and commercial imagery, giving brand logos and religious icons the same attention and placement. Carlos' paintings continue to evolve becoming denser and more meaningful while remaining alluring and magical.