The Plight of Matter - Nuno Ramos, Modern Art Musem, Fort Worth, Texas

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by David Ebony

Combining unusual materials and procedures, 40-year-old Brazilian artist Nuno Ramos has gained broad attention in his homeland for his sculptures and installations. The subject of a 15-year museum survey in Brazil, he recently showed a major installation on the West Coast.

A piece of matter, as it is known empirically, is not a single existing thing, but a system of existing things. When several people simultaneously see the same table, they all see something different; therefore "the" table, which they are supposed all to see, must be either a hypothesis or a construction.

--Bertrand Russell

It might be useful to keep in mind Bertrand Russell's relativistic definition of matter(1) when entering a room filled with works by Nuno Ramos, a 40-year-old artist from Sao Paulo. Ramos uses unlikely combinations of metal, wood, clay, glass, wax, resin, cloth, lanolin, salt, sand, water, oil, Vaseline, paper and paint--sometimes all in the same piece. His compositions resist clearly defined boundaries, stable centers of gravity and distinct focal points, not to mention restrictive meanings. Nevertheless, the artist conveys in each piece a consistent poetic sense. Ramos's work was recently the subject of a museum survey encompassing most of his approximately 15-year career. The show debuted last year at the Centro de Arte Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, and traveled to the Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo. Currently, his work is featured in "UltraBaroque," a large touring show of new Latin American art, which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and appears at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Feb. 4-May 6. During the run of "UltraBaroque" in San Diego, Ramos was invited to produce a major, site-specific installation. Titled blackandblue, the monumental piece was on view at the downtown branch of the San Diego MCA.

A largely self-taught artist, Ramos studied philosophy at the University of Sao Paulo. He aspired to be a writer and produced a short monograph on Pascal, as well as a number of essays, poems and stories. Many of these early 1980s writings were collected in Cujo, a book published in Brazil in 1993. Finding the blank page a crueler sphinx than the blank canvas, however, he turned to art-making full time in the mid-1980s.

Ramos's first mature works were large-scale abstract oil paintings of thick impasto and dark, bold lines that recall certain German neo-expressionist works of the period, particularly those of Kiefer and Baselitz. By the mid-'80s Ramos was showing with Casa Sete or Seventh House, a loose affiliation of Paulistan artists, including Carlito Carvahlhosa, Fabio Miguez, Paolo Monteiro and Rodrigo Andrade. The group's diverse works, which ran from Minimalism to expressionist-tinged abstraction, caused a stir in a 1985 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, and at the Sao Paulo Bienal later that year.

During this period, Ramos developed a complex visual vocabulary; his influences ranged from international figures such as Pollock, Beuys, Nauman, Smithson, Serra, Heizer, Stella, Kounellis and Merz to key Brazilians including Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles and Tunga. As Ramos gained confidence and exposure, his painting-derived compositions grew bolder and more sculptural. Attaching scrap wood and metal, crumpled paper and rolled pieces of sheet metal to large wood panels, he produced allover compositions slathered with gobs of dark brown, black, green and red pigment.

Some of the enormous wall reliefs of recent years bear outsized appendages that probe far into the exhibition space. On view in Sao Paulo were several examples, including an untitled 1999 work whose theatrical scale (10 by 16 by 9 feet) intensified the kind of personalized abstract drama taking place on the surface. The work features billowing swags of colorful cloth set against a silver and gold foil background splashed with red and brown oil paint, and thin copper tubing traversing the width of the entire field. Narrow cardboard or metal tubes covered in red cloth counterpoint a bright green cloth-covered bent tube on the left that juts out into the room like a long arm.

Over the course of the past 15 years, Ramos has turned increasingly to freestanding sculptures and installations. Despite the rigid geometry that is an attribute of many of his 3-D works, Ramos often strives for a kind of fluidity that lacks easily classifiable shapes or a single focal point. His labor-intensive efforts sometimes result in what might be termed anti-composition or formlessness. According to critic Yve-Alain Bois, "formless" works are those that "brush modernism against the grain," perform operations "countering modernism's formal certainties ... insulting the very opposition of form and content."(2)

The unifying element among Ramos's disparate sculptures and installations is a feeling of intense energy achieved not only by the fusion of unconventional and seemingly incompatible materials but by the artist's interventions, which range from gentle manipulation in some pieces to violent attacks in others. Among the earliest works in the Sao Paulo survey was an untitled minimalist object of 1987, about 6 feet high, made of 3-foot-long four-by-fours stained white, stacked like Lincoln Logs to form a boxlike column. After methodically arranging the wood pieces, Ramos filled the spaces between them with caked limestone, some of which spilled through the crevices onto the floor, surrounding the piece with small mounds of white dust.