Critical writing

His touch is strong, vigorous, assured; almost, we might say, robust. His works show how much introspective passion moves the artist's hand.

He has a keen sense of form and a gift for giving positive life to the contrasts between beauty and ugliness, linking them to the scathing fables of the fallen and the grotesque that run from Bosch to Goya.

I have seen in Banús an exceptional draftsman of extraordinary pictorial qualities.

Ramón Banús, without any doubt the finest draftsman in Central America… We are delighted that Banús is Guatemalan, for it gives us irrefutable proof that Central America is a land of limitless talent.

Virtuoso Banús. A painter's grandson, he carries the refinement of the craft in his blood. His art never went near troubled waters: it watched them pass by serenely. What portraits! What nuances! What a way of reaching into tenderness!

Banús has achieved every artist's goal: communication with the public. He has done it by looking closely at people.

If Ramón Banús's precise images possess anything, it is a mysterious breath of air… that reaches us, fresh and clear, to the depths of our eyes. Therein lies the particular grace of his drawings. That is his magic. His gift.

The truth is that Ramón Banús weaves his drawings in silence. What infinite power he has over the pencil!

Banús has spent his life in steady progression, which is what a true artist does.

It seemed there were a hundred painters in one. His portraits capture neither faces nor forms: they capture souls.

Ramón Banús, a gentleman of art. At times baroque, at times cruel, at times loving, at times grotesque, at times a dreamer, at times ironic, he projects images of Guatemala by way of other places.

Ramón Banús is one of the most important names in Guatemalan art. His work breathes, all at once, a stark baroque, an exasperated realism and the unyielding humanism that is his banner.

He brings mythological forms to paper as an expert draftsman of fine calligraphy, handling his pen firmly in rhythmic, sensual and sinuous lines.

He is the kind of friend who listens to another's sorrows the way a campfire listens: he neither questions nor accuses; he simply gives warmth.

Banús, the most Guatemalan of cosmopolitans and the most cosmopolitan of Guatemalans, does not want to portray Kukulkán, but to show us the Kukulkán we carry within. His art is neither popular nor elliptical. It is art. That is why it moves us.

Certain constants run through the work of Ramón Banús: a humor that lightens the weight of realism with ironic touches, the observation of human nature, and a sharp, irreverent imagination.

His intense and irreverent imagination extends the lines of satire throughout the work.

An artist so able to capture the truth of human expression and make it spring forth in a novel form all his own… the pamphleteer and humorist who conveys the breath of a magical truth made of warmth and simplicity.

Banús's creativity is simply brilliant: he knows how to make the complex simple and the simple complex, giving wings to dreams and dreams to the harshest realities that surround us every day.

From Fellini to rap: the range is wide. Ramón Banús is, in every sense, a universal being.

Framing him within a single movement is almost impossible because of his eclecticism: he is an artist who is always renewing himself, in technique as much as in subject matter.

All the mystery of life is incubated in the painting of Ramón Banús, because it is painting that comes from sorcery and magic, which is to say, in some way, from philosophy.

He wants to show the faces of men and women in their everyday surroundings, not to flatter or offend, but to unravel the ultimate meaning of those surroundings: the square, the bar, the home, the street.