Naufus Ramirez Figueroa

Naufus Ramirez Figueroa

Deus ex machina, 2021

Bronze, resin, rope

230 x 1480 x 100 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection 

In Deus ex Machina (2021), Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa reimagines an ancient theatrical device as a vehicle for ecological and cultural reflection. The work takes its name from the classical Greek trope in which a god would descend from above—lowered by machinery—to resolve the unsolvable within a dramatic narrative. Yet, in this haunting installation, no deity comes to save. Instead, suspended from coarse ropes, a scorched bronze branch hovers mid-air, evoking both natural ruin and ceremonial offering. Surrounding it are resin-cast masks, their ghostly faces referencing saints and protective gods from Guatemalan folklore. In place of divine intervention, Ramírez-Figueroa offers symbols of nature’s fragility and the spiritual forces once believed to guard it.

Ramírez-Figueroa describes his artistic language as a form of storytelling through prop-making—closely allied with theatre, though not confined by its conventions. Here, the theatrical scaffolding becomes a means to stage not a resolution but an unresolved crisis: the ongoing devastation of the environment and the lingering effects of colonial violence. The ropes that hold the installation in suspension echo the mechanisms of stagecraft, while also suggesting the fragility of ecological balance and spiritual continuity. By replacing the divine savior with a branch—burnt and brittle—the artist underscores the absence of miraculous solutions to our planetary crisis.

Though shaped by his own history of forced migration during the Guatemalan Civil War, Ramírez-Figueroa’s work reaches beyond autobiography. It draws on the allegorical and the fantastical to expose the absurdity of our current reality, revealing the deep entanglement between capitalist exploitation, cultural erasure, and environmental degradation. The masks, both solemn and spectral, speak to forgotten guardians and displaced spirits, suggesting that what has been lost—whether ecological or cultural—still haunts us. Deus ex Machina is not a lamentation, but a provocation. By invoking the theatrical to animate the ecological, Ramírez-Figueroa invites us to reckon with our complicity and our imagination. There will be no god descending from the rafters. The stage is ours.