ARCOmadrid’18

Del Infinito Gallery presents, for the first time, a Solo Project dedicated to Argentine artist Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos (Mar del Plata 1939-Buenos Aires 1992). The exhibition project is a careful selection from the exhibition held in Buenos Aires in 2017 and goes through different instances of his career, from 1960 to 1992, focusing mainly on his pieces on canvas and paper that revolve around the word and that gesture that transformed him into a unique reference of conceptual and dadaist art not only in Argentina but in Latin America.

Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos was a self-taught painter, draftsman, singer, actor, and philosopher. He always affirmed “I painted without knowing how to paint, I wrote without knowing how to write, I sang without knowing how to sing; repeated awkwardness became my style. ”

He was a channeler of collective thoughts, a quality that changed his life despite his origins, family name, and strong family mandates. He was the creator of phrases that still resonate in our heads and that transformed him into a cult artist, a “psychodifferent”, as he liked to call himself. These phrases reveal the acute perception of this artist who, building his path, left the world of art turned upside down. That he knew how to be a standard-bearer of Dadaist and Duchampian formulas claiming the idea that “Life is art”.

Federico Manuel could be both the most exquisite and intellectual as the most rampant or popular artist, as well as being extremely sensitive and subtle. This project aims to reveal that is the facet with which he knew how to make art, where theater, politics, and sociology prevails.

He was an advocate of his ideologies and never forced his work to fit in, even though he was desperate to be relevant. Not for nothing every time he could he went to the cafe on Uruguay street, in the heart of the city of Buenos Aires, looking for his friend, then director of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Rafael Squirru, and approached him anxiously to ask him always the same question: “Do you think I still have validity?” to which Squirru always replied affirmatively. He was not wrong since today, twenty-five years after his death, Peralta Ramos continues to be one of the most contemporary and avant-garde artists on our scene.