In 1989, on the top floor of the São Paulo Biennial pavilion, which had no air conditioning and was stifling due to unseasonably hot sun, Nuno Ramos saw some of his paintings melt. The works in question were made from an unconventional blend of ingredients for which he soon became well-known: a haphazard assortment of oil paint, paraffin, petroleum jelly, linseed oil, wire, scraps of fabric, crushed metal, rubber, cotton, and other less easily identifiable components.
Since then, Ramos has periodically “remade” (with some variations) these “lost paintings,” somehow returning – here’s a hypothesis worth considering – not only to the works he presented at the Biennial, but also to the scene of their disintegration: their “original swamp.” It’s as if that logistical glitch, like a kind of trauma in language that the hostile climatic conditions brought into evidence, had not only opened up a new interpretative perspective on these works, amplifying their procedure, but had also established a new modus operandi. After all, since then, Ramos has focused on challenging the capacity for coexistence and resistance of all manner of materials, turning the surfaces of his paintings into a kind of living flesh doomed to sustain a malaise that holds supposed conciliations in suspension. Melting was therefore a way of realizing a fantasy that was already contained in the work: that of shaping a world in his own way.
In the 1990s, Ramos added new materials to these viscid surfaces: mirror, glass, sheet metal, steel pipes, and brass plates, which projected his paintings outwards even more brazenly. The paintings grew forwards, not sideways or upwards, towards whomever was viewing them, in a no less threatening way. To blithely carry on adding more and more volume to these works was nothing short of admitting their monstrous vocation.
As Nuno Ramos joked in a conversation in his studio this year, whenever he works on these paintings, he feels like he’s feeding a monster. And when he defines his “slow-motion Frankenstein” in one of his essays, he argues that its form consists of “joining dead parts into a living whole.” Which is much like his paintings: heavy, histrionic creatures. With its magnetic predisposition and condensed intensity, his work prompts us to imagine how it might attract an infinity of other debris, remains of a decomposing world, incapable of distinguishing space and form or constituting an image.
If over the years Ramos has consistently challenged the capacity of these heaped materials (these “paintings”) to hold themselves up on the rectangular surface of the canvas, it’s because he has never ceased to be attracted to what one might call the catastrophic dimension of the art experience and the very brink of formal disintegration. As he said in another interview, “this ‘almost’ point is what I like. If I could capture any moment, that’s the one I would capture. That time of transition. I don’t like it when they fall, but I really don’t like it when they stay.”
Yet the new works here no longer melt, and their palette is far more hysterical than the muted tonal contrasts of the 1980s. The titles he gives them also tend to refer to other cultural objects and discourses, as is his wont: Uns [a few], O sol não adivinha [the sun can’t guess], La noche oscura [the dark night], Los pasos perdidos [the lost steps], among others. As with the paintings’ shapes, colors, and materials, their titles are not necessarily related to one another; they are more like fragments juxtaposed and coalesced on the surface of the canvas – a way of expanding not only the “vocabulary” of the works but, above all, their own volume.
Los pasos perdidos, in particular, gives us a clue as to how to make sense of the exhibition, since it’s also the name of the exhibition. This title is borrowed from a novel by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, which tells the story of a journey into the past: the story of a musician who decides to travel back to his origins in the Venezuelan jungle in search of primitive musical instruments. By borrowing the title for his exhibition, Nuno Ramos seems to point to something (the steps) that should be remembered, despite having been lost.
Typically, Ramos not only makes use of collages of quotes, but also draws on other voices to form a chorus of dissonance. Another significant reference here is Kazimir Malevich, who, in early twentieth-century Russia, declared that traditional forms should be destroyed in the quest for a “zero of form” that might reveal the true material of art. “I turned myself into the zero of form and emerged as the zero of one,” the suprematist would say, taking himself back to the blank sheet, which is the opposite of Ramos’s procedure. Traversing the catastrophe of progress and galvanizing destruction as a propositional force; reducing, starting over, going back to the origin of language; touching it for the first time.
In a new work, Ramos reproduces three of Malevich’s pieces in their original size in marble powder on stone, then gradually erodes them by means of an elegant machine that advances three centimeters a day. His choices are not the hits of black and white squares, but more heterogeneous versions composed of colored lines and quadrilaterals that dance across the white space. (Something about them brings to mind some of the best works of Brazilian neoconcretism, decanted to one of their origins). Furthermore, these are examples that demonstrate how Malevich does not match Mondrian for his rigor and how his forms, while primary, are nonetheless imperfect, sometimes more dynamic and, perhaps for this reason, more alive. Slightly flawed, they fail to display an ideal level of virtuality, introducing interference between avant-garde text and visuality.
To some extent, Ramos recreates the gesture of progressive disfiguration that underpins suprematism itself. Ironically, the destruction at play here has a somewhat contemplative air (the slow pace, the sand mandalas), which recalls Malevich’s mysticism: his ambition to achieve “revealed nothingness,” to turn his back on representation and lay bare the transcendental. However, once the ritual is complete, what remains is not the desired zero of form, but a handful of ashes, a haphazard trail, the trace of a movement that deforms the composition and interweaves its colors, ultimately producing the very image of its erasure.
The device that destroys the works is, in its own way, a desire-making machine, echoing something of the industrial perversity of Duchamp and Man Ray. Delicate yet violent, its persistence in unmaking the images is explicit and may even appear controversial, but that is not where it stops. If it makes desire, its work doesn’t result in the form of a product, but a blur, a shapeless drawing at best, as if it were referring back again to something from the paintings. In Ramos’s version, what the zero of form encounters is not so much the potential for a new order as a miniature version of chaos.
Each of these works is constituted as an arbitration among three divided and interconnected parts: it is a sand drawing, in the reproduction of Malevich: a provisional multiple that must be seen at the beginning of the show and is soon to be lost; it is also the desire-making machine itself, which keeps running throughout the whole exhibition period; and finally, it is the blur in the final version. By asking the viewer to see it like this, throughout its duration, as if it were a mini theater of the absurd or a living organism, the works question their own status as an image in the name of a more malleable existence.
Finally, the paintings on paper (or “drawings,” as the artist calls them) seem to pay tribute to Mark Rothko, for whom color is a dematerialized thing that is never constrained by the contours of the form: the outcome of an ultimate fusion of Turner and Matisse. But if the Jewish master aspired to order, stability, and balanced asymmetry in search of a metaphysical ideal to be achieved through abstract form (and here we see the lesson learnt from Mondrian), in Ramos what is left is mistrust, tension, disintegration, and materialism. If Rothko’s vaporous color emerges from a kind of watercolor technique translated into oil, the paper in Ramos’s drawings is weighed down by layer upon layer of thick paint. Rothko organizes his compositional flow on a succession of horizontal bands arranged vertically, while Ramos experiments with overlaps, setting up a critical relationship between figure and ground.
In these works, Ramos makes geometric reliefs out of paint, whose form, covered over by subsequent layers, turns into a shadow held suffocated beneath the surface, sometimes trying to get out, in disarray. This procedure is also combined with organic lines produced by monotyping, resulting in fine grooves that spread out and “hurt” the large masses of oil paint. Produced “blindly” at a faster pace, they offset the more contemplative effect of the ground. Here, the disembodied fantasy of the sublime is quashed by the material reality of the painting and exists only as a memory or an echo, already disconnected from its spiritual aspiration.
Los pasos perdidos is an exhibition whose strength, through its three sets of works, seems to reside in this dual movement of both casting a new gaze on a beloved object while also remaking it at will, reconstituting something of its original energy. In this movement, much is left by the wayside – something of the referent is lost; the lost object will never be the same again; the attempt to reproduce it is flawed – but a renovating intensity emerges. In other words, the work sheds its skin and undergoes its own metamorphosis.
As far as Nuno Ramos is concerned, this is ultimately “what making art is all about”: “trying to get back to the first book, to get back to the first version of the book I read, where things were right there waiting for me.” When he spoke these words, Ramos was referring to how disappointed he felt when he reread his most beloved childhood book, Robinson Crusoe, and was reflecting on what sense it would make to “for someone to keep trying to remake what’s been lost.” The conclusion he reaches is revealing precisely because it clarifies what might be a driving force of his work. Speaking about his experience of rereading Daniel Defoe’s classic, he said, “for me, it separated me from something I was madly in love with.” But he might just as well have been talking about his own melted paintings, his monsters, Rothko, Malevich, los pasos perdidos.
Pollyana Quintella e Victor da Rosa
March, 2025
