ABOUT
You can learn a lot from a sign, from the language it carries to the surfaces it lives on. In the neighborhoods I move through, especially those surrounding the port of Los Angeles, these visual fragments are everywhere. Some shout in bold letters while others speak through chipped paint and worn textures. They tell quiet truths about place, presence, and resilience. My work begins with what lingers: language half-erased, color worn down, and overlooked narratives.
I engage with the visual language of urban decay, drawing not only from signs on telephone poles, hand-painted promises, or found text, but also from the surfaces and textures that carry them. Color plays an essential role in this vocabulary. Sometimes it’s found in peeling paint or sun-bleached materials, other times it’s abstracted and reassembled into new configurations. These layered environments echo patterns across the American landscape. I move through these spaces daily, collecting discarded signs, photographing weathered forms, and capturing colors that might otherwise be overlooked. This practice is both observational and personal, shaped by a need to witness and document what the city leaves behind. Cardboard signs shout phrases like “FAST CASH” or “HOME LOANS.” Urgent and impersonal they reflect a raw clarity of fragments of longing, fragility, and steady persistence.
Cardboard serves not only as a surface, but also as a conceptual tool. Its impermanence mirrors the instability these signs emerge from: economic precarity, transience, and the commodification of hope. Through layering, subtraction, and distortion, I manipulate this visual language alongside the textures and palettes that surround it to expose its undercurrents. This allows for meaning to shift and drift, revealing moments of tension and subdued beauty.
My process involves painting, scraping, and sanding through the material, resulting in medium- to large-scale works built from layers of corrugated cardboard and paint. Some are raw and immediate, others are more abstract and obscured with fragments barely visible. Colors and forms gathered from the urban environment are echoed and reimagined. Compositional decisions such as where to leave space, obscure language, or let color dominate are intuitive, guided by a push and pull of tension, balance, and disruption. These actions are both destructive and generative, reflecting the erosion of lived spaces and the endurance of who and what remains. The works are broken and interrupted, calling attention to what is often ignored or unseen. The distressed surfaces reflect both the vulnerability of the message and the strength of those who carry it.
In reclaiming these discarded voices and overlooked materials, I aim to collapse the space between the personal and the systemic and between sign and signifier. It's a fragile archive of longing and resistance, where rupture gives way to rhythm, and fragments insist on being seen anew.
BIO
b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Los Angeles
Edgar Ramirez is a Los Angeles based artist whose work explores systems of power, erasure, and resistance through abstraction and material processes. Drawing from the social and industrial landscape of Southern California, his practice engages with questions of visibility, access, displacement, and the social consciousness, foregrounding the forces that shape and often marginalize urban life. Through surface, color, and form, Ramirez reveals what is typically hidden, overlooked, or deliberately erased.
He received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2020 and his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2018. His work has been exhibited in solo presentations at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles and Meliksetian & Briggs in Dallas, and has been featured in prominent art fairs including Frieze Los Angeles, NADA Miami, and the Dallas Art Fair. Ramirez's work is held in the collections of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation and the City of Santa Monica Art Bank. He was a recipient of the inaugural Los Angeles Lakers In the Paint grant and the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan artist-in-residence program.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Cultured, and Financial Times.
Representation
Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles