LA PASSION SELON: CAROL RAMA

Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2015, First edition, 271 pp., 7" X 9 3/4", Hardcover

Fine

The works of Carol Rama are the manifestation of a “base materialism,” to quote Bataille, or, as her friend the poet Eduardo Sanguineti described them, of an art suspended “between a refined brut and a cultured naïf.” Watercolors, in which we find snakes, lesbian couples and disrespectful—or liberating?—references to the history of art; bricolage, or paintings in relief, where, between blots of color and brushstrokes, the chosen objects, symbols of secret rituals, sink into the fabric of the picture; finally, the rubbers, created out of a mutant material par excellence, with their multiple allusions to travel, sex and the skin. Carol Rama breaks every taboo, conveying without reservation the flavor of a 20th-century freedom that others artists have enjoyed in secret: a freedom for which she paid the price of oblivion and rejection almost all her life. 

Text in French