Joe Ramirez is a visual poet, synthetizing painting and film in a new language: The Gold Projections. Using a technique, which he has since patented, Ramirez projects films onto a circular, slightly convex, wooden panel, which he has gilded by hand in an elaborate process, leaf by leaf and layer by layer. This creates a unique projection surface, which determines the form of the projected images. In this debut artist book, an entire lifetime of dreaming in light is condensed to display a process unique to the California-born artist, whom Wim Wenders considers "a 21st century Renaissance artist". From furniture designer, to monastic fresco painter and inventor-filmmaker, Joe Ramirez unites worlds that are only apparently disjointed. Personally building exquisite, water-guilded surfaces receiving Goyaesque moving images from state-of-the-art projectors, Ramirez is a master in creating a suspension of time evocative of Andrei Tarkovsky.
The book includes pictures of paintings, round silverpoints, water-guilded panels and stills from The Gold Projections, which speak the timeless language of dreams and memories. At the heart of the book is Joe Ramirez’s latest film painting Somnium (Latin: "dream"), based on Johannes Kepler’s 1608 novella of the same name, which describes the author’s dream journey to the moon.

Clothbound hardcover with tipped-in title shield
20 x 24 cm
200 pages
110 color illustrations
English
ISBN 978-3-86828-785-1
Artist: Joe Ramirez
Texts: Mark Gisbourne, Drew Hammond, Jim Rakete, Jörg Völlnagel, Wim Wenders
Published by Kehrer