SPOTLIGHT | Carol Rama and raw material

“I choose these things, prostheses, false teeth, shaving brushes, razors, urinals because they are what I like the most, they are victims of what they are, they have no chance of changing.”

–Carol Rama

Defiantly deviant, Carol Rama’s art is animated by raw, maverick energy. Alternately described as “sensurrealism,” “organic abstraction,” and “porn brut,” it moves between inspiration and madness, exulting in states of abjection and obsession. Inextricable from her womanhood, Rama’s oeuvre stands out in a male dominated art world for its frank exploration of feminine and queer desires.

The artist’s first solo show at the Faber Gallery in Turin was censored when Italy’s fascist government shut down the exhibition of 27 watercolors, all signed with the artist’s full name “olga carolina rama.” The watercolors that had been deemed too lewd for public consumption were figural, art-brut renderings of naked men and women in sexually explicit poses; the images of women masturbating were singularly obscene. Long before the second-wave feminists would assert the existence and importance of female sexuality and the feminine gaze, Rama was unabashedly creating delicate yet poignantly affectionate images from a highly sexual and insistently feminine perspective. The artist had never received any formal training during her bourgeois upbringing, and accordingly these early watercolors are imbued with the budding artist’s raw energy and youthful boldness.

In the 1950s, Rama briefly aligned herself with the Milan and Turin-based Concrete Art Movement (MAC). Yet, in the 1960s, she turned away from its Informel vocabulary, finding it overly stringent and sterile. Questioning the validity of painting as a medium, she began to append heterogeneous objects and materials to otherwise traditional aesthetic supports such as paper and canvas. Drawn from the real world, these items were insistently eclectic, sourcing from both nature (hair, fur, animal claws, and teeth) and industry (electrical fuses, plastic tubes, and batteries). Far from arbitrary, each held a deeply personal significance for the artist.

Her frequent use of rubber inner tubes refers to her father, who owned a bicycle-manufacturing factory. Her attraction to surgical tools may further allude to her mother’s struggle with mental illness and eventual institutionalization. Yet, while anchored in childhood traumas, Rama’s materials open onto a dense associational field. Supple and fleshy, the rubber tubes recall aged flesh and limp phalluses, while the sharp-edged syringes suggest states of addiction and psychosis.

In 1962, Rama’s close friend, the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, gave the name “bricolage” to this series of work: a title which she soon adopted as her own. Each Bricolage operates like one of Sanguineti’s disjunctive poems, carefully accumulating and juxtaposing materials to achieve a strange somatic charge. Marked by their excessive, even disturbing, materiality, each conceives the pictorial support as a quasi-body teeming with desire.

Rama’s work of the 1960s often revolves around the accumulation and juxtaposition of highly specific materials to achieve a strange somatic charge. Marked by their excessive, even disturbing, materiality, each conceives the pictorial support as a quasi-body teeming with desire. Carillon (1966) translates as ‘Music Box,’ but also carries with it a phonetic association with carrion—the rotting flesh of dead animals. Comprised from a palette dominated by reds and pinks, the central ovoid form evokes both an open wound, and female genitalia, verifying Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s observation that ‘the body and its sensual, murderous ruin are never far from [Rama’s] mind.’ Splashes of brown and silver seep into the support as if still wet, suggesting bodily fluids, rust, and other forms of degradation. Of the color red, Rama has stated: ‘red is an erotic excitement that enters my work at times, it gives and adds a bit of depression to my deep anxieties, but it cures them too.’ At once passionate and angry, Carillon registers both the acuity of Rama’s attack on aesthetic propriety and the intensity of her emotional life, where communicated to the viewer in material form.

Rama devoted most of the 1970s to highly graphic, rubber-based compositions, establishing a complex body of work that is simultaneously refined and fleshy, as the rubber tubes recall aged skin, yet the clean lines and simplified forms reveal a minimalist bent. The title, Spazio anche più che tempo (“Space even more than time”) was bestowed upon several rubber-on-canvas works dating from the early 1970s, all of which present formal explorations of negative space and abstracted topologies. Deceptively simplified, Rama’s 70s rubber works are highly autobiographical, as the material is closely linked to the artist’s father, who owned a bicycle-manufacturing factory that went bankrupt, leading him to commit suicide when Rama was 24. Yet the material retains its own set of social implications, as a symbol of mobility and agency, broadening its implications to the social and economic conditions of postwar Italy.

Found materials take on new meanings in new contexts. In particular, Spazio anche più che tempo (1971)  is of special import, as the canvas material comprising the support dates from the medieval period—oriented to recall a cathedral altarpiece—and the artist gifted the work to a close friend of hers who was a local Turin physician. Collapsing multiple personal and art historical eras onto the space of the picture plane, this work manifests an amalgam of interstitial spaces in the psychic, historical, and physical realms.

Rama establishes her practice as what philosopher and curator Paul Preciado terms a “somatopolitical force,” i.e., she materializes bodies as political subjects comprised of “biohistorical archives” and at the mercy of the apparatuses of control—both organic and inorganic—that dominate our sociopolitical reality. Preciado situates Rama’s Bricolage works within the genealogical lineage of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as both are principally concerned with the concept of corporeal collage and reanimation. In Rama’s assemblage works, one witnesses the redefinition of each medium in the work, as the decontextualization of each element reveals specific implications attached to each object, which, after Rama’s careful arrangement of each element, converge to establish a new meaning.

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