Courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York

Martín Ramírez, Untitled (Vertical Tunnel with Train) ca. 1960–63. Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on pieced paper, 32 x 26 in.

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In 2007, the American Folk Art Museum mounted the first major retrospective of the artist Martín Ramírez, a schizophrenic Mexican immigrant who spent his last three decades in mental hospitals in California, where he made what was then thought to be more than 300 drawings of obsessive repetition and nuanced beauty. After the survey opened, its curator received an astonishing email: a woman in California described a trove of some 140 Ramírez drawings that her father-in-law — the medical director of the hospital where the artist last lived — had amassed in their garage. On view for the first time, those drawings — all made between 1960 and 1963, the last three years of Ramírez's life — often are composed of long, horizontal pieces of paper glued together with spit, their yellowed surfaces featuring obsessive nets of wavering, fluted lines. Such lines coalesce into Ramírez's recurring motifs of arches, tunnels, and train tracks, sometimes made sinister by subtle shading of a Hades-like orange. While the works can contain cartoonish caballeros and spiky cacti — invariably walled in by lilting, impenetrable lineation — that evoke Ramírez's ranching roots in Jalisco, their most prominent characteristic is their exuberant, claustrophobic abstraction. In this, the pieces recall artists as disparate as Paul Klee, whose musicality of line is apparent here, and Saul Steinberg, with his architectural, urban panoramas. To that end, Ramírez might be said to define a middle ground between the two, where the sublime and the comically urbane meet. Nevertheless, in the absence of his earlier oeuvre's many Madonnas and highly hued figuration, the austere abstractions here hit a more unsettling note. Gorgeous, paranoid, and tangibly sad, the works reveal a consciousness surrounded by walls that, at last, were unassailable.

"Martín Ramírez" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.