Untitled

This diptych represents the culmination of Ramiro Llona’s work during the 1980s, when he gradually abandoned his expressionist beginnings in order to formulate a rigorous and synthetic abstraction. Through minimal elements, Llona defines a complex composition in which broad fields of color predominate, derived from the American abstract painting that he would fully identify with from 1981, the year he settled in New York. However, the simplified form of what appears to be a cloud, significantly split in two by the frame of the diptych, suggests a horizon. The figurative gestures, in this case the evocation of a landscape, are maintained in constant play with the abstraction and the insistence on the picture plane. This tension between depth and surface, figure and abstraction, recurs throughout his work. This diptych announces the beginning of a geometric period that would reach its height in the early 1990s, when he returned to Peru and his painting began to reassume allusive or clearly figurative forms.