Carol Rama crashed into the twenty-first century like a wrecking ball from the oblivion of the recent past. Born in Turin in 1918, she lived in enchanted luxury until she was eight, when her father, a prosperous industrialist, went broke and the family was reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence. In 1933 her mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital, which the young Rama found oddly comforting, even freeing.
Around that time she began making watercolors of writhing women with extended triangular red tongues, amputated limbs, tubelike black snakes emerging from their vaginas, and feather-like crowns of flora sprouting from their heads. Sometimes they’re surrounded by prosthetic limbs, piles of dentures, medical beds with hanging straps, or men wagging clusters of penises bunched like bananas. When these works were shown in 1945, they were censored as obscene and subsequently disappeared from view; upon resurfacing in the 1980s and 1990s they were hailed as an important model of feminist antifascist art.
In the 1950s Rama began making highly textured abstractions that by the end of the decade incorporated various “low” materials and objects such as rice and heavily patched tire rubber, which was characteristic of Arte Povera, one of the major currents of postwar Italian art, but they were suffused with her own adamantly erotic politics. Motifs of parallel arcs intersecting with almond shapes echoed the snake penises and vaginas of her early work, whose roiling content became both more intense and more expansive as it became more abstract, allowing texture, color, and shape to accommodate multiple, sometimes contradictory associations. This voluble painterly language gave her the capacity to address extremes of human experience—poverty, war, desire, sex—with a zigzagging synthesis of figuration and abstraction.
Her brief association with the Movimento Arte Concreta group, which focused on geometrical abstraction, in the late 1950s and early 1960s was an exception in a life at odds with the art world of her time; she was not unknown but somehow not considered. Widespread recognition finally arrived in the three decades before her death at ninety-seven in 2015.
In contrast to the sprawling retrospectives of her work in Europe and New York a decade ago, Hauser and Wirth’s first Rama exhibition, “I See You You See Me,” focuses on a tight selection of recurring forms. On the central wall of the gallery are six paintings of similar size (roughly one hundred square centimeters), all made in 1969 and 1970. Each of them has a central biomorphic structure glopped out in thick glue on an otherwise blank expanse of dirty cream-colored canvas. This shape has been spray-painted black, with accents of another color—rust red, dark green, sky blue—underneath, leaving a chromatic glow.
When obliquely misted with paint, the raised body of shiny glue shields the edge where it meets the surface, leaving a slim blank “outline” tracing the sinuous shapes. These glimpses of color and refractions of light play tricks on the eye, shifting the temperature of the black from warm to cool, conjuring dynamic complementary afterimages, and giving the pictures a quivering quality, like optical breathing. Embedded in the glue are a panoply of plastic and glass eyes and circular pockmarks evoking empty sockets. These few elements are continually rearranged, yet there is no repetition in the visual logic of the pictures.
The mass-produced eyes resurrect the specter of dismembered dolls or the gleam of life restored to the stuffed corpse of an animal. But these canvases are not faces; the eyes, sometimes single though often paired, swarm and flow across the surface, looking out in many directions. They form inchoate fluid bodies and reflect back one’s experience of looking, making the paintings hover somewhere between a surrogate and a mirror.
Rama referred to these as “Napalm” works: something about them was a response to images of the burned, brutalized bodies of the Vietnam War. In their unlikely fusion of elegance and abjection, they are at once playful and disturbing, disarming and upsetting. One untitledcanvas from 1969 is dominated by two knobby limbs whose tops are joined to a compressed armless torso; at its center, right where the genitals might be, is a large yellow eye. A perfect circle, it organizes the high-gloss black and rounded shapes around it, visually moving back and forth with utmost subtlety. A carnal monument, staring back.