c. 1999 Religion News Service

CHICAGO _ One brief glimpse of Joseph Luis Ramirez’s restoration of St. Scholastica’s chapel takes one through a tunnel of artistic time. A luminous countenance of a welcoming Jesus initiates the journey. Angels, apostles, saints and martyrs flank the image ancient iconographers called Christ Pantocrater. A slain lamb, representing Jesus’ death on the cross, is throned beneath. Hues of azure, saffron and gold beckon.

Ten years ago, Ramirez’s vision and painstaking restoration helped rescue these half-century old frescoes al secco (dry wall frescoes) from pollution, humidity and the threat of destruction.

The first step was painstakingly restoring Beuronese frescoes originally painted by Josef Steinhage, an artist from a Benedictine abbey in Germany. But by the late 1980s, the frescoes were so deteriorated that the nuns living at St. Scholastica’s Priory considered whitewashing over them.

The restoration began in 1988 after Ramirez, then in his final year as a painting and film major at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, responded to a note posted on the institute’s job placement board. Seven years later, the reframing of the 12 stations of the cross lining the three walls surrounding the central fresco completed the task.

Along the way, a life’s work and a new company, Axis Mundi, were born, attracting commissions from Foggia, Italy, to Dubuque, Iowa, and clients such as author Annie Dillard and Houston theologian Louis T. Brusatti.

Created to function like the famous Renaissance and medieval workshops, Axis Mundi utilizes Ramirez’s many skills, the works of other artisans and the talents of his wife, Meltem Aktas, an iconographer.

Ramirez, a California native with Hispanic roots, brings an interdisciplinary approach to his work. Whether the project is restoring one set of stained-glass windows or redefining an entire worship space, his work blends the old and the new. Each project reflects his love of theology, Florentine artistic training, English furniture-making experience and American film study.

Ramirez said Axis Mundi works to maintain the standards set by past and present masterpieces to interpret the polarized worlds of secular and spiritual art.”The biggest thing for me is the paradigm of the workshop,”he said.”It really has been all but lost. To form this company, I kind of traced it back to when everything was under one roof, both physically and ideologically.” His goal was recovering the artistic vision that shaped the Renaissance workshops where artisans of varying degrees of skill forged many masterpieces under the guidance of a recognized master. His was the guiding vision. Apprentices came to the workshops to train and produce works for sacred spaces in homes, schools, houses of worship and other buildings.”What I’ve kind of done is to take the paradigm of film directing and shifted that to overseeing the church work,”Ramirez said. In filmmaking, the director shapes a vision carried out cooperatively by different department heads who ensure the overall concept is not diluted.

Transferring that to art restoration and creation, Ramirez strives to ensure that his clients and fellow artists share a sense of where they are going. Axis Mundi will not undertake a project until Ramirez meets at length with the faith community involved. Then he oversees each project, step by step.

In the process, specialized workers _ from silk weavers in Italy to silversmiths in Istanbul _ and glassmakers, woodworkers and sculptors join forces with more contemporary artisans as model makers and computer artists.

The approach, Ramirez said, is holistic, designed to mirror an understanding of life in which God is both ultimate creator and the source of all love and wisdom.

Axis Mundi’s tasks are diverse, ranging from tiny, 3-inch icons painted by Meltem Aktas to restoring or creating original art for entire chapels.

Included in larger projects have been processional crosses, baptismal fonts, vestments, hand-stenciled designs, tabernacles and candlesticks.

Distinctive to Axis Mundi is its blending of modern design concepts with traditional iconography and liturgical forms, said Robert Loescher, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Following the 1950s liturgical reform movement, some church sanctuaries emerged devoid of devotional imagery, a break with past practices when worship space was created with the intent of involving the worshipper.”I think Joe restores one to that. But he doesn’t overwhelm you,”Loescher said.”He allows his work to be a structure through which the worshippers can find their spirituality.” In creating worship space, Axis Mundi nods to the need to integrate narrative space and time. Things unfold in sequences. There is an altar, a statue, an icon, each distinctive, yet part of a whole.

In a sense, Axis Mundi crafts in Western form what Eastern iconographers have done for centuries, said David Philippart, an editor for Liturgy Training Publications in Chicago.”When an Eastern iconographer goes to `write’ an icon, as they say, they are always basing the new work on older forms,”he said.”Sometimes it is a very subtle reinterpretation.” Such attention to detail is apparent in Ramirez’s work, said Brusatti, the Houston theologian.

Now dean of the School of Theology of the University of St. Thomas School in Houston, Brusatti was in charge of a house where Vincentian Order priests and brothers lived in Chicago when he first met Ramirez and Aktas.”We wanted to create some common prayer space in the house,”Brusatti said.”In making this decision, the house members confronted a number of questions: How could this space be formed into a domus, a house for our common prayer? How could we create a sacred environment to foster the contemplative moment? Was there room for an altar?” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

The setting alone was a challenge: a very small room with white walls, a wood floor and two off-center windows looking out over a small yard, a parking lot and city alley.”He took a room, probably 9-by-12 feet, and turned it it into a complete environment,”Brusatti said.”The walls really were like canvasses in terms of color and texture. He worked on the lighting. He created an altar with a crystal top.” When a limited budget made it impossible to include original seating in the design, Ramirez located reproductions of Stickley settles _ long wooden benches with high backs made by a celebrated arts-and-crafts period furniture manufacturer. Aktas did two icons for the room. The Vincentians were amazed.”The feeling when you walk into that room now is you walk into another world,”Brusatti said.

When he moved to Houston in 1995, Brusatti brought with him a piece of Axis Mundi. Aktas made a small icon of St. Louis for Brusatti as a going-away present. He keeps the icon on a table in the midst of a cluster of family pictures.”It’s a constant reminder to me of the depth of the spiritual and the artistic tradition in the church,”Brusatti said.”It’s there with my dad’s first communion picture and a picture of me when I was a kid and a picture of my grandparents. There’s a sense of a much bigger connection. I can look at the family pictures and the icon ties it all to a religious tradition that is much bigger than just one family.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Early Byzantine iconographers understood their works as portraits of the saints, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Through each icon flowed a channel of grace and the miraculous power of that Christian figure. The tradition lives on in Aktas, a Turkish native who loved the icon-imbued churches of her homeland and of nearby Syria.

Byzantine iconography combined with a deep fascination with Christian and Islamic spirituality honed her vision. Trained in traditional egg tempera icon painting, she also learned the Flemish technique of oil glazing. An individualistic blend of the two now shapes her artistry.

Describing a Pieta diptych _ a hinged, two-panel painting _ which she painted for a friend, Aktas said she wanted to provide her friend with an image that was easily packed, but also”lovely enough to invite contemplation.”Soon she realized painting the image was only the beginning: it needed to be shaped by faith.”The image,”Aktas said,”would have to be completed over time: layered with contemplation and prayer so that whenever it would be opened, no matter how foreign the place, my friend would be at home.” Each Sunday at their religious community’s Mass, the Benedictine sisters at St. Scholastica’s in Chicago share such an experience. A priest celebrates. The order’s younger nuns prepare the altar, read from the Bible and assist with Communion. Older sisters, some in wheelchairs and some hobbling on canes, cluster around. They come together under the outstretched arms of the icon of Jesus restored by Joe Ramirez.

DEA END HOLMES