Simón Ramírez
 17:59

17:59 marks a threshold. A moment suspended between what has passed and what is yet to emerge. It is the trace of a time that urges us to cross—through a portal, into elsewhere. A border. A limit. The edge.

That crossing can be delicate—razor-thin—or sudden, a violent shift. Yet every passage holds a quiet aspiration: the possibility of meaning, not in meaning itself. To give oneself over to transition, even when it unfolds through imagination, desire, dream, or the fevered disorientation of hallucination. Language, like time, becomes unstable at the threshold. Words lose precision; meaning shifts or loops back. Estrangements are not exceptions but part of the terrain. In this space, clarity is slippery. Navigation happens through fragments, approximations, and the residue of experience.

In 17:59, painting becomes both a map and measure of this temporal and linguistic in-betweenness. It accumulates like time itself: in layers, in opacities, becoming the sediment of an internal landscape. Each surface becomes a record of passage—a slow journey on foot. Not a destination, but a transit. A crossing of thresholds, of imagined contours and unseen borders. In 17:59, painting is a portal into the not-yet-lived, the dreamt, the remembered, and the forgotten

Simón Ramirez (1988, Medellín, Colombia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Simón holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a degree in graphic design from the Pontificia Bolivariana University in Medellín.

He has been based in the United States since 2014. His artistic work explores ideas around the structures of language, dissociation, intuition, and misunderstanding. He works across mediums such as painting, drawing, and printed matter.

His project El libro que tiende a desaparecer (The Book That Tends to Disappear) was launched at Casa Bosques (Mexico City) and later at Printed Matter (New York). This work is now part of the collections of institutions such as Mumok (Vienna), the John M. Flaxman Library at SAIC (Chicago), and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich). Additionally, his work has been exhibited and published at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, National Portrait Gallery in London, ProxyCo Gallery, backbonebooks, Center for Book Arts in New York, Parent Company Gallery, among others.

In addition to his artistic practice, Simón is the co-founder of Miriam, a curatorial platform based in Brooklyn, New York. Miriam is an exhibition space and artist bookshop focused on the dissemination and democratization of practices rooted in contemplation, collaboration, and play.