I paint by instinct and I paint out of passion
And anger and violence and sadness
And a certain fetishism
And out of joy and melancholy together
And out of anger especially.
—Carol Rama
Carol Rama’s art moves between inspiration and madness, exulting in states of abjection and obsession. Inextricable from her womanhood, Rama’s oeuvre is distinctive for its frank exploration of feminine and queer desires. Throughout her career, Rama maintained a resolute autonomy, surpassing available critical vocabularies that sought to contain her idiosyncratic vision. By turns perverse and subversive, her work stands ahead of its moment, anticipating present-day debates on the aesthetic intersections of sexuality, representation, and power.
By the 1960s, Rama had cultivated her artistic practice for more than two decades in Turin. Her work of this era revolved around the accumulation and juxtaposition of highly specific materials. Drawn from the real world, these items were eclectic, sourced both from nature (hair, fur, animal claws, and teeth) and industry (electrical fuses, plastic tubes, and batteries). In 1962, Rama’s close friend, the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, gave the name Bricolage to the series of paintings to which the present work belongs. In turn, each Bricolage operates like one of Sanguineti’s disjunctive poems, carefully gathering and arranging materials to achieve an uncanny somatic charge.
To create Bricolage (1964) Rama combined paint and clusters of eyes manufactured for doll making and taxidermy. The eyes—striking in their artificiality—resonate with voyeuristic and fetishistic possibilities. With its excessive, even disturbing materiality, highlighted by its imposing original frame, the present work conceives the pictorial support as a quasi-body, sporting glinting irises and mottled bruises. Here, Rama plays with the possibility of a haptic mode of perception that involves touch as well as sight, implicating the viewer as both purveyor of the work and an object of its unsettling gaze.
This work has been registered by the Archivio Carol Rama under no. 1268.