Jay Ramier – Pirates of the Carribean-s

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Drones, diaspora and urban culture: Jay Ramier transforms the visual grammar of contemporary war into a critical reflection on history, identity, and representation.

Pirates of the Caribbean is the artist’s second solo exhibition at Noire Gallery. The title evokes not only a popular imagination but also the history of the African diaspora in the Caribbean. The figure of the “pirate” becomes a metaphor for identities in motion, shaped by crossings and cultural transformations connecting Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. The new series of works addresses the contemporary imagery of war through drones targeting specific sites. Ramier transforms these sequences — often resembling video game aesthetics — into painting, questioning the gap between real violence and its spectacularized representation. Originally sketched and conceived as a celebration of “island life” and sound system culture, the exhibition pivoted in response to urgent geopolitical developments. Resulting in a series of painting works that interrogate this collision of forces, as the artist frames it:

“It’s a sound clash of technology and sound of bombs versus sound of the bass, the downpressers’ use of technology versus the ingenuity of the righteous.”

Drawing from his Caribbean roots, the artist intertwines colonial memory, migration, and contemporary culture. His works blend popular iconography and pop visual language with a deliberately “naïve” or primitive yet refined style: a kind of visual jazz where mistakes and imperfections become an integral part of the pictorial melody. Painting thus becomes a tool to critically read the images through which our time narrates — and often simplifies — reality. A pioneer of European hip-hop and graffiti culture, Ramier co-founded the Bad Boys Crew in 1982 and became a central figure in the Parisian scene of the 1980s. His multidisciplinary practice — spanning painting, music, and urban culture — was recently presented in the major 2022 solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where he explored the connections between Black diasporas as spaces of memory, spirituality, and political discourse.

Jay Ramier, born in 1967 in Guadeloupe, lives and works in Paris. His work charts the Pan-African diaspora across the Americas, dwelling on its tribulations and struggles as much as its humour, resilience, resistance, and creativity — embodied in its music andunconventional use of language. He is a co-creator and contributor to several landmark publications, including the pioneering Hip-hop fanzine Zulu Letters (Paris) and the first street-art magazine Backjumps (Berlin). He is also artistic director and contributor to the conceptual project Afrikadaa, a magazine founded in 2010, dedicated to African artists and marginalised territories.