CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/3/2015

The Passion According to Carol Rama

The heretofore largely overlooked Italian painter Carol Rama (1918-2006) has been much in the news lately, with reviews for her 2014-2017 traveling retrospective in all of the major international art magazines and newspapers. We are pleased to announce the release, at last, of the remarkable book that accompanies the shows, in which Lea Vergine writes, "So, who is Carol Rama, really? She is a devilish angel, kind and wild; she is a supreme amateur; a survivor hunting for originality; she is a Manganelli's fool and a blazing kobold; she is an artifice, a perfect mise-en-scène; a mosaic of ruins of rotten leftovers of the past; she is a character of literature, she is a poem by Sanguinetti and a passage from Baudelaire; she is exotic, erotic and heroic. Besides, she is 'damned and beautiful,' primitive and blasé, beaten and impermeable, strong and asthenic, sparkling and rascally, aristocratic and plebian, pervert and naïve, humorous and sorrowful, educated, shy and diligent, a wandering minstrel and a hermit. Is she Molly Bloom or Alice, Lady Ramsay or Pandora, Sisyphus or Icarus, Gorgon or Cagliostro, the Medusa or Eurydice without Orpheus? Nobody, absolutely nobody, can answer these questions. The artist gives and denies herself, cloaked in permanent mystery." Featured image is "Appassionata" (1943).