Chapter III
Perpetually searching
Senza titolo, 1967 (Detailed view)
“I have no rules.
I start however I want and keep going.”
Carol Rama
Original, impressive, powerful and yet delicate. Carol Rama’s oeuvre alternates between striking and subtle moments and follows a very personal path. The range of Rama’s work reveals a great artistic freedom.
As an artist, Rama was perpetually searching. An interest in new forms of expression and openness for experiments were her motors, constantly. At the same time she draw on current trends. This is evident as early as in her artitic roots but also in her time in the Turin collective of the “Movimento per l’Arte Concreta” (MAC) in the 1950s. Her material collages from the 1960s coined the term “bricolage” in art history. During the 1970s, she continued her imaginative use of unusual materials in her “Gomme” (En. Rubbers). These three creative phases are particularly indicative of the artist’s body of work due to their diversity.
Rules and rhythm
– a member of the MAC
In the early 1950s, Carol Rama distanced herself from representational painting and found a way to a clear, abstracted language of forms.
In the shift away from figuration, questions of composition and the order of the image surface come to the fore. The artist creates series with both reduced and extended color palettes and stark color contrasts. At the same time, Rama makes works with new materials by experimenting with faux fur and fabric. Large formats appear for the first time, including oversized fabric collages. The artist found like-minded creatives in Turin during her shift towards geometric abstraction, and in 1953, she officially joined the Turin collective of “Movimento per l’Arte Concreta” (MAC).
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Senza titolo, 1951
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La linea di sete, 1954
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Composizione, 1959
What is MAC?
After the end of the Second World War, there was a strong international, artistic shift towards abstraction. As a counter-movement to the constraints of fascist aesthetics, non-objective painting became prevalent in Italy. One example of this is Concrete Art, which emerged before WWII. It stood for a new concept of art that focused on questions of composition and color as well as a visual language of geometric abstraction that follows clear rules. It was in this spirit that the “Movimento per l’Arte Concreta” (MAC) was founded in Milan in 1948. In contrast to other Concrete Art collectives, the artists of the MAC did not follow any strict geometry and instead also made use of rounded, irregular forms.
The publication of “arte concreta” magazine from 1951 to 1953 aroused interest in this movement throughout Italy.
In 1952, the Turin-based collective of the MAC was formed by founding members Annibale Biglione, Albino Galvano, Adriano Parisot, and Filippo Scroppo. In 1955, Carol Rama joined the group with her friend Paola Levi-Montalcini, but the alliance was short-lived. The group disbanded in 1958 after only six years.
Her time as a member of the MAC was artistically very productive, but Carol Rama breaks away from the movement in the late 1950s in favor of her own path and instincts. Nevertheless, she reflected positively on the MAC stating, “I’m really happy I had this opportunity to fit in.”
Bricolages
– openness and improvisation
After her early phases of figurative work and then Concrete Art, Carol Rama turned to new materials in the 1960s and found unprecedented expressive freedom. In doing so, she created material collages with tremendous power – the bricolages.
In the early 1960s, the artist begins to experiment with the creative properties of collage. She combines various materials such as glue, enamel, spray paint, and ink which is loosely applied on the canvas. Her color application technique is reminiscent of Art Informel. Also known as Informalism, this is a non-figurative, abstract art movement that dissolves form compositions by emphasizing spontaneity and chance instead. Rama’s artworks move away from flat, pictorial backgrounds and enter the third dimension. The palate of materials she uses is enormous: metal shavings, doll eyes, wire, syringes, furs, animal claws, and much more. The artist produced larger bricolages on rigid surfaces, such as canvas and cardboard, but she also worked with paper.
“I have always had my own
little language that has served me.”
Carol Rama
The small-format work “Presso il pungente promontorio orientale” (En. Near the Sharp Eastern Promontory, 1967) is dominated by two splashes of color –diluted, watery black and matt pink. The canvas appears darkened and aged. Where the splashes overlap, there are two differently-sized, bright blue dolls’ eyes with eyelashes on top of enigmatic, scientific-looking formulas in white ink. In the top-left corner, there are three blue dolls’ eyes applied on top of more formulaic writing in black.
The artist created an impressive series of large-format bricolages in fiery red, including “Senza titolo” (En. Untitled [Maternity], 1966). The canvas is completely covered in bold red with contrasting black. In some places, the colors are thickly applied, while elsewhere they flow into each other in subtle transitions. The vertical form accentuated by fine, white lines evokes obvious associations of a vulva. There are a few bright blue dolls’ eyes applied around its perimeter.
An abstract form made of liquid glue and black spray paint is applied to an off-white background. Upon closer inspection, the form becomes a figure with an oval-shaped torso and four limbs, each ending in two to three short digits. Against a splash of red paint, taxidermy eyes with elongated pupils are placed next to each other vertically. This work belongs to her series of “napalm paintings” which were created as a reaction to the Vietnam War. The series alludes to the bodies of the victims who were burned and fragmented by the infamous weapon.
An artistic practice: Bricolage
In 1946, Carol Rama met the poet Edoardo Sanguineti (1930-2010), who would become one of her closest friends. He supported her work and wrote numerous texts about it for many years. The two remained in close contact until his death.
Sanguineti first used the term “bricolage” in 1964 to describe her material collages. This was a reference to French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ book “La Pensée Sauvage” ( En. The Savage Mind), which had been translated into Italian the same year. Based on the French verb “bricoler” (En. to tinker or to do-it-your-self), Lévi-Strauss developed the term “bricolage” to describe a creative process by which one improvises and makes use of materials available in one’s immediate surroundings.
Sanguineti recognized this practice in his friend’s artistic practice: “These rules, the need “always to adapt to the equipment at hand, to a set of tools and materials that changes but is ‘finite’ […] as well as heterogenous,” namely the guidelines for any bricolage, are at the same time the ground rules of this new art that wishes to stop patiently at the reality that is immediately available, that does not bend and does not engage except, with the closest reality, the most strikingly everyday, external to any project, related to anything that “it can always serve,” and that already seems to be culturally bound to a practical, differentiated destination, testimony to the history of an individual or a society.”
The artist tackles uncomfortable themes and constantly pushes the boundaries of what is considered image-worthy.
Whereas objects are used as subject matter in her earlier works, Rama now mounts them on the canvas. The objects themselves trigger discomfort; evoke disturbing associations; and appeal to a range of strong emotions.
By way of contrast, Rama juxtaposes them with neatly written mathematical formulas and physics calculations. By encircleing incidental splashes of color with fine lines, she brings order to the canvas. Thus, the bricolages synthesize uncontrolled impulses with detailed precision.
Luis Buñuel, Un chien andalou, 1929 / Dora Maar, Les Yeux: Element Pour Photomontage, 1935
Time and again, Carol Rama uses various kinds of artificial eyes in her bricolages. The roles of the observer and the artwork are reversed. The work appears to be the one doing the observing – a very jarring effect.
Surrealist artists also use the motif of eyes in this way. In countless works by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, or Dora Maar, the eye is enlarged, multiplied, or alienated as an isolated organ detached from the body. Film became a popular medium for visual experiments highlighting the eye and the act of seeing. One example is the iconic opening scene from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s silent film “Un chien andalou” (En. An Andalucian Dog, 1929), during which a freshly sharpened razor cuts through an eyeball. The scene is both astonishingly graphic and absurd. The proximity of Carol Rama’s bricolages to Surrealism is undeniable.
Rubber
– a humble material
In the early 1970s, Carol Rama begins experimenting with a material she has known since childhood.
She saw tires and inner tubes in the factory of her father, Amabile Rama, whose midsized company manufactured automotive and bicycle parts until the end of the 1920s. Unfortunately, his business went bankrupt during the Great Depression, and the Rama family’s circumstances changed drastically. Amabile Rama died in 1942 at the age of 52, potentially by suicide. These early, traumatic experiences become thematic points of reference in Rama’s art decades later.
“Tires remind me of my father, of the factory;
they remind me of power.”
Carol Rama
Two dark, undulating planes merge into each other. The poetic effect of this work is reinforced by its materiality: rubber. It is a simple, commonplace substance. By limiting herself to just a few materials – primarily rubber – the artist continues engaging the design principles of the bricolages. This work series is characterized by its simplified compositional elements which are arranged with utmost restraint. With works such as “Autorattristatrice” – a neologism which roughly translates to “a woman making herself sad” – Rama makes an overt political commentary again on the USA’s napalm bombings during the Vietnam War.
The discarded, cut-up tires that Rama hangs on hooks on the canvas dangle like entrails in a sausage factory.
The “Gomme” (En. Rubbers) series is very reminiscent of the Italian art movement of “Arte Povera”, whose members consciously made use of “poor” materials that were easily accessible, commonplace, and affordable. Rama also integrates aspects of the international Minimal Art Movement. This movement is characterized by a restrained use of forms – often geometric shapes – and a reduced color palette. In true Rama fashion, she offers her interpretation of Minimalism by evoking associations of skin, organs, and biomorphic forms against gloomy, often matte black, backgrounds.
