Carol Rama: Antibodies

FROM THE BOOK

Carol Rama is one of the Italian figurative painters most revered by younger fans of video and installation art. Why so? Because her approach to painting, assemblage, and re-creation has always moved on many different levels, ignoring the canonical rules of fashion and expediency. In the 1930s and ’40s, Rama foreshadowed the tastes of our era and, until her death in 2015 at age ninety-seven, continued—indomitable and impassioned even at that truly biblical age—to pursue an attitude straight out of comic opera, where everything we hold most sacred about suffering and love is turned on its head through a highly sophisticated form of sarcasm.

Before she was even twenty, emerging from the Turinese cultural milieu of the 1930s and ’40s that gravitated around Felice Casorati, Rama fired off a hundred watercolors that pierced straight to the heart. She titled them Appassionata [Passionate]. They are a parade of horrors and marvels: fox stoles, false teeth, shaving brushes and razors, shoes bereft of feet, tragic beds fitted with restraining straps, wheelchairs housing truncated bodies. Pages and pages of sophisticated, seductive ferocity, an inventory where suffering and degradation are delicately veiled in pink and purple. Shreds and tatters of adolescence, startlingly explosive madeleines! Yet these chilling effigies are cloaked in fairytale, often taking on a mythic aura.

In the 1950s, Rama engaged in her own way with the theme of abstraction, producing paintings of a barbaric, morbid geometry: diamonds and lozenges float in lunar landscapes, a coded microcosm, a simulation of organic rhythms. And later on, she explored objects like fingernails, teeth, needles, and glass eyeballs. These works are always obsessive and cartoonish, even in the stitching, scraping, and patching that could be ascribed to the ferment of Art Informel.

In the 1970s, her interest turned to car tires, bicycle tires, sheets of plastic. In 1977 this exploded into the lugubrious splendor of the work titled Movimento e immobilità di Birnam [Movement and Immobility of Birnam]: a bundle of rubber tubes, quivering bladders, and industrial entrails dangling from a metal hook against a black leather background. Birnam is the name of the wood that moves towards Dunsinane; it moves because it is made up of soldiers bearing boughs for camouflage as they march to overthrow Macbeth. Here too we find the artist’s unholy affections, pious and obscene poses, her thirst for expiation, her fever for beauty. These are the spices with which Rama seasons the banality of everyday things: rubber tubes, tow hooks, and bits of leather.

The force of her turbid reveries wells up undiminished, like the passions of a mystic, in her mixed-media works of the 1980s. Registry of office charts and maps of the city of Turin seem to evoke medieval treatises, covered in human and animal figures that symbolize virtues or occult forces, absurdities springing from remote minutiae. These are enchanted atlases lined with demons and disreputable angels, shameless couples, grubs and snakes, bulls and frogs and lizards among flowering branches and green fronds—filled once again with fragrances and stenches, freshness and decay, and all the tender, wicked ashes of wit that make her paintings an endless odyssey.

Her fanciful marks and fierce descriptions of limbless nudes, frogs, knives, diabolical angels, flying dentures, faces with two or three red tongues—all the way to cow udders cut out of rubber and glued to the canvas—speak directly to viewers, transporting them into a late-Romantic realm of trembling and longing. The skill with which this virtuoso masterfully blended prized and worthless materials gives her works a physical tangibility that is expertly obscene.