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

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by David Ebony

Certain aspects of Ramos's project recall Joseph Beuys's endeavor to find a connection between substance and spirit. Following Beuys, Ramos seeks the spiritual in art through a kind of politicized autobiographical approach. Like Beuys, Ramos manages to imbue his humble materials with metaphorical or symbolic significance. Life processes of birth, metamorphosis and decay are explored in works such as Milky Way (1995), an elaborate installation on view in Sao Paulo, which had been previously shown, in 1995, at Brooke Alexander Gallery--the only major work Ramos has presented in New York to date. The installation features numerous small, irregular, clear blown-glass globes suspended a few inches off the floor and walls by means of serpentine cast-aluminum supporting rods. Like a giant cocoon that has just lost its butterfly, each of these podlike formations contains varying amounts of milky fluid made of a lime and water mixture, some of which has splashed onto the floor and dried in chalky pools. Dozens of small, translucent, pale yellow hemispheres made of Vaseline and paraffin are stuck to the walls; they could be the eggs of some giant insect. The work may be seen as a kind of organic counterpart to Tunga's contemporaneous installations where enormous, industrial-looking receptacles of iron and bronze are arranged on the floor alongside long ropes of braided copper wire and glass vessels filled with iron filings [see A.i.A., June '98]. Ramos's frequent use of mucilaginous substances that resemble various bodily fluids lends his work a lifelike quality.

The artist's sense of humor is evident in "Fungi," a 1998 series of large, biomorphic, terra-cotta pieces that he integrates with household furniture. In one of these works, which recalls certain Charles Long sculptures, a bulbous, unadorned ceramic object, like a brown pillow, sits in an elegantly upholstered armchair. One end of the blob seems to have engulfed the edge of an adjacent mahogany table, ingesting it like a ravenous slug.

Perhaps the most striking and eloquent works are a series of spare monuments. Two related sculptures, White Manora (1997) and Black Manora (1999), convey a funereal tone. These severe, 6-foot-tall, narrow boxlike shapes, one in white marble and the other in black granite, stand upright like enormous tombstones. Each features a deep groove several feet long, carved lengthwise along the top, into which is inserted a long, thin, rectangular panel of stone, approximately 2 feet high. The artist poured along the top of each piece a large amount of liquid Vaseline, which drips down the sides of the sculptures, forming a sticky puddle at the base. A tarlike viscosity of the liquid covering Black Manora was created by adding ash to the Vaseline.

The recent San Diego installation, blackandblue, is similarly elegiac and monumental. For the work, Ramos and a team of 12 assistants built three plywood boxes: one 6-foot cube and two oblong structures, up to 7 feet wide and 16 feet long, which filled the large gallery space. The team covered the structures with more than 18 tons of clay-reinforced black sand, piled on in layers 6 to 8 inches thick. In one of the largest blocks, a long, narrow, clear glass tube with one bulbous end filled with motor oil and black pigment, rested in a groove several feet deep, cut lengthwise along the top center. A similar tube hung down the side of the other long block, while a smaller glass vessel filled with an oil and Vaseline mixture lay atop the cube. A massive yet fragile installation, the sand covering eventually crumbled, and the piece was completely destroyed in January, after the San Diego run of the show. It will not appear at the other venues for "UltraBaroque."