Separate Reality is pleased to present The Shape of Unease, an exhibition of Santa Barbara sculptor and painter Armando Ramos’s latest works. A pronounced sense of duality guides Ramos’s practice. Between the ironic and sincere, the industrial and the handmade, the reverent and irreverent, his work relishes in states of contradiction. Drawing on disparate materials and techniques, Ramos creates uncanny juxtapositions and surprising dialogues. The paintings and sculptures included in this exhibition touch on themes central to Ramos’s career-spanning investigations, such as mass production, pop-culture, memory, and spirituality.

One form Ramos turns to again and again is that of the basket. Intricately constructed through an architectural process of ceramic firing and glazing, the baskets are meditations on linear fragility and negative space. Similarly, his series of knots, made from rope cast in aluminum, emphasize the entanglement of time and space, form and function. In Fragment Still, a blue ceramic egg is poised atop a twisted steel frame, which functions as a sort of setting, as if for a precious jewel. In this case, he presents us with an image that evokes the natural world and birth cycle alongside consumerist materials and production. His technical constructions belie their oftentimes humorous and playful underpinnings.

Ramos’s paintings create a compelling dialogue, especially in relation to their three-dimensional counterparts, often mirroring the themes we see driving his sculptural practice. Tactile and bold, the paintings are unafraid to emphasize their own materiality. In The Study Between Us, Ramos lays thick globs of enamel over the faces of a religious scene he picked up while traveling. This intervention renders the figures in the found image anonymous but with their halos intact. Stripped of their context, the image loses its religious specificity and enters into the form of the spiritual, perhaps a commentary on a universal desire for belief as traditions shift and evolve. Toggling between abstraction and figuration, Ramos’s paintings walk a delicate line between the technical and conceptual.

The Shape of Unease is on view at Separate Reality (111 Santa Barbara Street, #C, Santa Barbara, CA 93101) from December 6th through January 18th. The gallery is open by appointment only.