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Lot Essay
‘I paint by instinct and I paint out of passion
And anger and violence and sadness
And a certain fetishism
And out of joy and melancholy together
And out of anger especially’
CAROL RAMA
In Carol Rama’s Untitled, a fuzzy, monochrome apparition dissolves against a neutral zone of white. Spray-painted cigarette holders add a sense of physical depth, whilst the edges of the black mass are softened and an enamelled network of bubbles seem to spatter from its surface, so that the form appears to smoke or foam. Untitled is an excellent example of Rama’s assemblages, affirmed as bricolages by friend Edoardo Sanguineti, which were executed in the 1960s. Hovering between haunting figuration and formless abstraction, Rama’s contextual surroundings informed her works’ aesthetic style and implicit meaning. Whilst grounded in the fetishistic surreality prevalent throughout her entire œuvre, the present work addresses difficult issues relating to the Vietnam War. The charred blackness of what could be two skeletal legs enveloping a region of genitalia evokes incendiary disaster. However, this interest in organic substance is secondary to Rama’s intentions of manifesting a concrete physicality combined with what Anne Dressen has referred to as ‘the idea of formlessness’. ‘Rama struck’, Dressen notes, ‘recognisable objects in her paintings, but the matter is never absorbed by the image-object, nor is the image-object absorbed by the matter.’ (A. Dressen, ‘Foreign Bodies’, in The Passion According to Carol Rama, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2015, p. 42).
Rama’s bricolages deploy a wealth of unconventional media to create these ‘formless’ object-paintings. With plastic eyes, matchsticks, cigarette holders and syringes (beside a multitude of other found objects), Rama conjures optical Surrealist mutants, phallic blotches and abstract universes. Rama took her cues from the 1960s Arte Concreta movement in Turin, and Arte Povera, a term coined by Germano Celant to refer to unusual, readily available everyday materials utilised as media. Sanguineti, a close friend of Rama’s and a champion of her work, examined her bricolages according to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term. In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss speaks of the bricolage as a means with which to organise, rearrange and reimagine the world, taking familiar objects and reordering them to construct new meaning. Dependent on psychoanalytical association, Rama selects her materials carefully, subverting and debasing them to project new interpretive diversions and unexpected imagery. In this untitled work, the hard, metallic shrapnel of the cigarette holders recalls gun bullets or some other military remnant, whilst the oozing black enamel flows organically like lava. This fetishistic extroversion challenges us to review recent history, whilst creating a novel and unimagined vocabulary of emotions, plunging us into a cosmos at once visceral, existential, and troublingly unpredictable.
And anger and violence and sadness
And a certain fetishism
And out of joy and melancholy together
And out of anger especially’
CAROL RAMA
In Carol Rama’s Untitled, a fuzzy, monochrome apparition dissolves against a neutral zone of white. Spray-painted cigarette holders add a sense of physical depth, whilst the edges of the black mass are softened and an enamelled network of bubbles seem to spatter from its surface, so that the form appears to smoke or foam. Untitled is an excellent example of Rama’s assemblages, affirmed as bricolages by friend Edoardo Sanguineti, which were executed in the 1960s. Hovering between haunting figuration and formless abstraction, Rama’s contextual surroundings informed her works’ aesthetic style and implicit meaning. Whilst grounded in the fetishistic surreality prevalent throughout her entire œuvre, the present work addresses difficult issues relating to the Vietnam War. The charred blackness of what could be two skeletal legs enveloping a region of genitalia evokes incendiary disaster. However, this interest in organic substance is secondary to Rama’s intentions of manifesting a concrete physicality combined with what Anne Dressen has referred to as ‘the idea of formlessness’. ‘Rama struck’, Dressen notes, ‘recognisable objects in her paintings, but the matter is never absorbed by the image-object, nor is the image-object absorbed by the matter.’ (A. Dressen, ‘Foreign Bodies’, in The Passion According to Carol Rama, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2015, p. 42).
Rama’s bricolages deploy a wealth of unconventional media to create these ‘formless’ object-paintings. With plastic eyes, matchsticks, cigarette holders and syringes (beside a multitude of other found objects), Rama conjures optical Surrealist mutants, phallic blotches and abstract universes. Rama took her cues from the 1960s Arte Concreta movement in Turin, and Arte Povera, a term coined by Germano Celant to refer to unusual, readily available everyday materials utilised as media. Sanguineti, a close friend of Rama’s and a champion of her work, examined her bricolages according to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term. In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss speaks of the bricolage as a means with which to organise, rearrange and reimagine the world, taking familiar objects and reordering them to construct new meaning. Dependent on psychoanalytical association, Rama selects her materials carefully, subverting and debasing them to project new interpretive diversions and unexpected imagery. In this untitled work, the hard, metallic shrapnel of the cigarette holders recalls gun bullets or some other military remnant, whilst the oozing black enamel flows organically like lava. This fetishistic extroversion challenges us to review recent history, whilst creating a novel and unimagined vocabulary of emotions, plunging us into a cosmos at once visceral, existential, and troublingly unpredictable.