Breathing Light

When American artist Joe Ramirez visited the Tricycle offices in May 2024, he came slinging a messenger bag across his shoulder bearing several items related to his most recent project, a sort of magnum opus of his life as an artist thus far. The contents of the bag included an assortment of prints, a few booklets, a MacBook Air, and a carefully protected golden disc, delicately wrapped in black felt cloth. As Ramirez told us about his journey from craftsman to fine artist—studying painting, filmmaking, and sculpture in Chicago and London before working as a fresco painter and restoration artist—as well as the Herculean effort of bringing his current project to life, he passed around the objects from his bag, making sure to include a special caveat to not touch the disc’s surface. Thinking back to it now, I am moved to recall Dogen’s treatise in the Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Cook) for monastery cooks to treat each ingredient they are using as if it is their own eyeball. Circumspectly removing the gold disc from the felt and gently circulating it around the room, it was as if Joe had plucked out one of his eyeballs, straight from his head, and carefully passed it around our Union Square office.

In the ’90s, stopping in Rome on a trip back from Moscow, Ramirez had the unique opportunity of viewing Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings up close. And it was there, suspended from the ceiling—Ramirez’s actual eyes rolling past scenes from The Last Judgment—that an idea was born: “fresco cinema.” This gold disc that we held in our hands was but a miniature model of the massive discs used in a project that has consumed Joe Ramirez for the past twelve years and taken him around the country and to various parts of the world, the culmination of all of his study as a painter, filmmaker, sculptor, craftsman, and visionary attempting to craft his own pictorial language: The Gold Projections.

Using a patented technique, Ramirez projects films onto these massive circular, slightly convex, wooden panels, which he has gilded by hand in an elaborate process, leaf by leaf, layer by layer. This painstaking effort creates a unique projection surface, which determines the form of the projected images. Beyond the screens, Joe is also involved in every step of the filmmaking process: from the igniting inspiration of these grand visions down to the most minute aspects of the shoot including storyboarding, cinematography, casting, and wardrobe. Silent works that move at a dreamily slow pace, the films function much like moving paintings, archetypical in their content, inviting the subconscious to dance with the scenes long after the viewing has finished. 

Tricycle’s executive editor, Philip Ryan, recently sat down with Ramirez as well as American Vajrayana Buddhist teacher Justin von Bujdoss to talk about The Gold Projections, what oneiric qualities Ramirez’s works share with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of dark retreat, and how the mind is always the ultimate projector. 

– Mike Sheffield, Web Editor

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Philip Ryan (PR): Justin, when we at Tricycle saw Joe’s work, you were one of the first people we thought of because of the dark meditation aspect. Can you talk about how you were first struck by Joe’s work?

Justin von Bujdoss (JVB): It was interesting timing. In May of last year I had been out in LA leading a retreat, where I met an artist affiliated with UCLA who came to talk to me about the dark retreat workshops we’d done at the Rubin in 2023 and 2024. We had tried to play around with projection and things like that to try to mimic the visions that one experienced during dark retreat, or yangti, practice. The team at the Rubin and I quickly learned how hard that was, because projection produces light. Some of the technologies that my artist friend mentioned sounded really expensive and complicated, so I never thought I could go more deeply into the reproduction of the dark meditation experience outside of the practice experience itself. And, when you all reached out to me, I was doubly interested, because then there was another opportunity to look at this from a fine art perspective, and a unique one at that. 

Seeing the disc for the first time was very captivating. Its monolithic presence feels otherworldly, even somehow prophetic. Is it an eye, is it a lens, is it a mirror? Perhaps these are similar questions that we can ask of our own mind. Then there is the painterly quality of it on top of everything else. Just now, when we were watching these films, I was struck by the idea of your films as portals, which is in a way what the dark retreat experience is like. In dark retreat, you’re manifesting imagery based on the energies in your body and the habitual inclinations of the conceptual mind. I’m very interested in the idea of these as terma, which are revealed treasures—a type of revelation that sometimes takes the form of physical objects. Sometimes they’re texts found in the earth, or underwater, or hidden within architectural structures, or they can arise within the mind of the person who reveals them. Terma keep the tradition fresh and flowing—they maintain freshness and continuity. Whatever the issues that a given time is facing, the people in that time benefit from the “download” of such direct revelations. I was also thinking about portals that can convey meaning, and the artist being somebody who is creating a preserved experience for people from which constant new meanings can arise.

Is it an eye, is it a lens, is it a mirror? Perhaps these are similar questions that we can ask of our own mind.

This aligns somewhat with views found within Dzogchen, and again, specifically with dark retreat. It’s believed that the visions experienced are being produced through your eyes, as if our eyes are projectors, and what we are experiencing is our own narrative journey, our situation, our predilections, our allegories and metaphors. They manifest from our heart and move outward through our eyes to be experienced directly as the perceived appearance in front of us. Even though Joe’s films are very curated and specific, very metaphoric and allegorical, the viewer can’t help but project onto them.

Joseph Ramirez (JR): What’s really important to me is what you’re saying about the eyes. I’d even simplify it more, to the one eye, the aperture. The term portal is used a lot. In a way, the word “portal” was contaminated for me by science fiction and fantasy films. For me it’s not just the projection out. It’s breathing images back and forth. It’s the image that comes in and goes out of our bodies and psyches. I was really interested in the lenses we carry. Everything we see is round before the image is cropped to fit a rectangular frame. All photography, everything that we see comes through these lenses and curvatures. Often a portal is something we step through, a magic threshold. But what I’m reaching for is the internal world. I wanted to bring people into that space where they experience themselves as portals. Their eyes and intuition are the doorways of perception. We only need to be aware. 

This body of work, The Gold Projections, gives the viewer complete freedom to enter sight and then exit. I showed you the film of the woman awakening in the cave (Vermilion, 2020). As she awakens and steps out of the opening entrance of the cave, you’re overwhelmed with a wash of colored light, but at the same time, you’ve been in the cave. We awaken physically to the world of light every morning. But more importantly, we can awaken internally.

On the visionary side, I’m interested in capturing timelessness in film. 

PR: The figures in the films Somnium (2017) and Vermilion seemed to be wearing, if not medieval clothes, some sort of timeless human dress.

JR: The quest is for simplicity. It’s simplicity of costume, maybe a beige dress or suit. I want to strip it down to the most basic forms of costume, so you can’t tell if it’s 1910 or now. You could be walking down 14th Street and see someone like this. You’d walk right by. And this is really important, because I would lose that sense of timelessness if I were to have somebody in Converse tennis shoes . . . you know?

What I’m interested in is simplifying. By that I mean, stretching the things we look at, the people, the costumes, the places, into a bigger river of time. In many of the pieces I’m interested in things we wear that can stretch across centuries. It could be the look of the Amish, a Japanese peasant, or a one-hundred-year-old piece of clothing from Latin America. It just needs enough detail to differentiate the characters, allowing the expression of that form without encumbering details. This way the most power can be projected by the actors and cameraman.

The clothing is an expression within the expression, a form within the form. I’m trying to reach across time, and you could say even into the future, since everything returns. All the costumes were made by hand, very carefully, by Christina Wahle and Terril Scott in Berlin. The viewer at some level picks up on every stitch. 

PR: Joe, your background started in furniture-making and design, and then painting and fresco painting. How does that inform what you’re doing now?

JR: It’s really good to be talking with you and Justin, because Justin’s father was a painter. You grew up with all of this language around you, and you have the expertise in dark meditation. I trained in England as a furniture maker and designer, and went into it very deeply, specializing in Ming dynasty furniture. 

While in London, at the Tate Britain, I discovered two things: painting and the drawings and poems of William Blake. On my return to the US, I got into the Art of Institute of Chicago to formally study painting. I immersed myself in the adjacent museum for two years. 

But there is one step that happened really early, and that left a profound imprint on me. My father was a plumber and often helped out at a Dominican monastery in Menlo Park, California. On Saturdays, he would bring my brothers and me to help him. We would carry his tools, and he’d fix the heating and plumbing.

Experiencing this liminal and pristine contemplative home of the nuns and their presence in the place really affected me. The cloisters, light, structures, and costumes were utterly set apart from outside spaces. 

Often a portal is something we step through, a magic threshold. But what I’m reaching for is the internal world. I wanted to bring people into that space where they experience themselves as portals.

When at the Art Institute I was looking for jobs with my friend, the photographer Sean Culver. I stumbled across this job on the “job board,” that frescoes needed restoration in a Benedictine abbey. And so I began this fresco restoration with Culver, and we jumped in at the deep end on a project that spanned seven years. Frescoes are in units on the wall, and they have square corners. They’re not round because of the architecture. What I began to be interested in is how the eye moves from picture to picture. 

The next layer was film. It was the last thing I thought about in my life. I had nothing to do with film even though I grew up in California. But I discovered the language of Andrei Tarkovsky. When I saw Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, the first dream sequence just changed my life. His language brought everything together. It was as if everything snapped into focus. Blake, space, memory, prophecy, painting. I proposed to my friend Sean that we make a film on William Blake’s last poems. Blake was a visionary and poet and artist, a master-level draftsperson, and I spent a year going into Blake’s work in England and then in Chicago. We were coincidentally born on the same day, two hundred years apart. Working with Sean and the influence of Tarkovsky changed my whole life, and those three layers added up: the woodworking, the painting, and then the film, the moving image. Sean, who has a brilliant eye as a photographer, shared like a teacher, teaching me to see and understand seeing. This is a seeing in the way John Berger describes it in his writing. It takes time and stillness.

There is one last piece of the story about the frescoes. I had gone to Moscow to meet some of the people who knew Tarkovsky. On the way back, I stopped in Rome, and I was given permission to go up to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which they were restoring at the time. There was a contractor’s elevator there to the upper platform. The guards put me inside the cage of the elevator, and up I went, right past the fresco of The Last Judgment, about a meter away. By this time I had five years of fresco work behind me, so I was highly attuned to the surfaces and mark-making of Michelangelo. And it was all scrolling past me, almost like a Victorian theater screen. The elevator moved very slowly for about thirty seconds, and I said to myself, “OK, this is it—there is no scene. There is no boundary. It’s the breathing and awareness thing. Just see.” 

It’s the flow of image to image. And when this came to a full circle, for me, I was interested in poetics and dream, like, epiphanic dreams, and that comes from the Blake influence. I see each film as a poem. It might be eight minutes, or it might be three hours and forty minutes. So I see them as poems, and then it’s bracketed in the body of work.

In a way, it’s like kneading bread. You have your flour, your yeast, and your water. You mix it, you raise it, and you knead. When you get good at it, you know the feeling. That’s how I view what I’m doing, just kneading these images. It’s an annealing process that is related to alchemy. 

JVB: One of the things about the layering that relates to dark retreat meditation is that in that practice, everything is emerging. This relates back to the notion of breathing. Everything is emerging from something else and then dissolving back into something else. There’s a very palpable experience of that, where you can make out what is happening, then the background begins to change, or the foreground begins to change, or the lighting changes, which creates other kinds of forms. What we are constantly doing all the time is nothing but a kind of flow. We experience the visual—there’s the actual form, the background, the negative space, and everything just flows, including sound.

I’m very curious if you have given any thought to sound. In dark retreat, it’s essentially silent. But again, it’s such a deeply engaged experience that you can almost hear things as they are invoked or evoked. Sound invokes sense. In the films, there was one image of a door, and then it was as if something was manifesting, and I thought, “Oh, this is like a portal,” a portal in, a portal out, an evocation and invocation. This has meaning in the Vajrayana tradition. It is a very magical tradition of invocation and evocation all the time in relationship to space and nature and your own mind. You see this process play out in these films too, and not only play out, but it creates the sense that things are being invoked within and directly evoked in front of you at the same time.

JR: That image of the doorway that comes out of the red background, and then forms within the doorway, is a dialogue with Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. That thing that you see come out is a person, a figure falling into the water. The streaks splash out of the frame, and the blind man’s cane is left floating in the sky. The stick is what I’m interested in, an interior sight that allows the sightless to see, almost like a prophet. 

I think that poetics is everywhere if you can drop this grinding mind. This grind, this thing that creates narratives in whatever form, if you can drop that, you see these forms, these beautiful luminescent colors, these shapes across time and these highlights and depressions. And you drop the labels, you drop everything, and then, if you add movement, you discover—I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in a coffee shop or a bar with a cinematographer and I’m showing them the candle, a plate, or a cup, and I’m like, “I want you to create and dialogue with light like that.” And they say, “What?” Because they’re locked in the technical language of their trade. I’ll say, “I need a wash of red to come across the disc in this way, at this speed, then dissipate.” All the hundreds of paintings I’ve made—big or small—are things in themselves but also tools on the carpenter bench. I painted them for the joy of painting and to help my cinematographer so we can go further with the language. We are all entrenched in traditions of seeing and making. 

JVB: When you have everybody who is involved empowered in that way, then you avoid the familiar storyline of the lone artist capturing the “thing.” This makes it much more like an expression of multivalence, toward all of humanity, because you have many people coming together, just like the layering. There’s your mental layering. But then, like you say, the editor must layer, the cinematographer also layers. It’s being projected onto a layered structure. The disc has texture. And maybe that comes together in a way that makes it more archetypal in nature and in tone. The feeling of watching is like being in dark retreat, because it feels like you’re participating in some kind of experience that is old, not in the sense of being from the 1800s but a premodern archetypal human experience. It becomes an archetypal interaction with color and form, primal and dreamlike, in a lucid dream kind of way.

JR: When I did my first two features, the Descent on William Blake and Viridian, I followed the forms, traditional film forms, as the director, and got the whole team together. And we finished the films, this monumental work, as all films are. But, to be honest, I didn’t like myself after that, and it was one of the reasons I backed away from it for a couple of years. I just didn’t want to live that way. And with the development of The Gold Projections, it was almost like a reset.

JVB: In the Buddhist world, I occasionally come across people who insist that there should be a division between politics and practice, but I think that a very good practice is political. It’s like hitting a tuning fork. You hit it, and it resonates in a certain way. If it resonates in a really clear way, one that doesn’t require the specificity of form, it’s just this sound being, vibration. I think people, regardless of background, or faith, or political views, or class can appreciate that. If you’re able to hit a really clear tone, which is what I think these films do, it speaks so honestly to the person, and the person can speak honestly from their own experience. This is political, because, as you know, working in these churches, I’ve seen these situations too, there’s always fundraising. Even if it’s of the purest kind, just to keep the lights on, but it always veers off. . .

JR: To ego, yeah.

JVB: Which is interesting too, because you’ve been talking about feeling like you didn’t like yourself after those first few film projects that sounded more like they required a filmmaker or that was the central ego, the central director, and you didn’t want to do that.

JR: Or just steamroll in there. That’s usually what happens. Yes, I felt so guilty for that, but now I feel very good about these steps, to be honest, and I feel very clean. The reset took fifteen years to develop. It coincided with when I really took Buddhism seriously through the generosity of Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. It was their incredible patience and understanding and couldn’t-care-less-ness of my wanderings or errors.

They became like a pair of Virgils to this Dante who found himself in a “dark wood.” I remember talking to Joseph after a five-day private retreat, and parenthetically, I’ve read much of the canon of Western mysticism over the decades, which I still love today, but it wasn’t until I could really expose myself to the Buddha’s teaching that I realized that I’ve never seen something so accurate in my life that showed so clearly the way the mind functioned and the freedoms of form just sitting there to be taken. I was like, “Oh my God, so this is it.” I told Joseph and Sharon, “Let’s do it.” My job from here on out is to allow the practice to flow in the forms of language of The Gold Projections.