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Soccer is the passion of multitudes. From Lagos to Los Angeles, from Buenos Aires to Baden Baden, soccer, or football as it is commonly called outside the United States, is the single most popular game in the world. Millions of newspaper column inches are devoted to soccer every day; tens of biographies of footballers or coaches are published every year; popular songs are routinely written to celebrate the lore of local or national teams. Over the last decade, even a few price-winning novelists have turn their hand to the sport's diverse charms. Yet, curiously, no painter has ever attempted to capture the dynamism of the sport, give testimony to the incredible euphoria and history associated with the game. No one, that is, until Ruben Ramonda.
Born in Cordoba, Argentina, Ramonda has been a soccer fan as long as he can remember. Frequenting stadiums in his home country as well as in the U.S. and Italy, where he has lived, Ramonda has experience the engulfing magic of fandom where it counts, in the arena. But due to the difficulty of toting his brushes and canvas to packed bleachers on game day, Ramonda has learned to make his soccer paintings in a less confrontational, more controlled manner: in front of the television set. With brushes and colors in hand, Ramonda has trained himself to react to the beamed images of the match's most important plays like a seasoned courtroom reporter, sketching goals and breaking moves with a deliberateness, precision and speed that mirrors the swerving athleticism of the game's star players.
Set atop brightly colored backgrounds that suggest the playing conditions on match day, emerald green for a uniform pitch, pale gold for a sunny day, light blue for clear skies or a combination of these and darker colors to signal the variability of the weather, Ramonda's rapidly painted figures trace their leaps and feints in sequences that recall the images of muscular runners and trotting horses in Edward Muybridge's stop-motion photography. Concerned, like the Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni before him, with depicting continuous motion in two dimensions, Ramonda immortalizes key moments of the world's most important soccer matches by presenting the same seminal figures over and over again, like stills from a videotape.
Made up of a set of frozen moments, the paintings contains a painterly approximation of the drama and joy experienced at the pinnacle of soccer history. Painted with a verve and immediacy that recalls one of Boccioni's manifestoes, " What we wnat to do is show the living object in dynamic growth ... to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed, " Ruben Ramonda's paintings communicate the emotion, transport, fatigue, fervor and movement of the true sport of the world's masses, soccer. A game which in the immortal words of Edson Arantes do Nascimiento, Pele, e mais que un jogo . Just as Ruben Ramonda's canvases are more than paintings, soccer is always more than just a game.
Chritian Viveros-Faun
October 2001
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