Nuno Ramos, the curious, the intrepid, with a latent energy that translates into matter, returns to Belo Horizonte (MG) in March, in an exhibition at the Albuquerque Contemporânea gallery, with more than 15 works created during 2024. And some news.
Nuno has always been on the move. He has been interested in literature since he was very young. He writes, paints, creates installations and performances motivated by the adverse circumstances that Brazil is going through. He pours his pictorial energy onto objects, using large layers of paint and exploring color, one of his trademarks.
A arte!brasileiros spoke to Nuno about his work, his concerns, references and his projects for 2025. Read on:
ARTE!✱ - What were you thinking when you started doing this series of works, in 2024?
Nuno Ramos – It will be exactly one year old: I started in February, emptying my studio, which was unbearably full. I had started this process a year before. We sent more than 3000 items to two storage companies: trees, a boat, an airplane, things like that. It was an absurd amount of stuff. And then it was empty, and I started filling it up again. It was a great thing to see, my studio, which is 600 square meters, empty. It was an incredible feeling. I had stuff and I still have it, more than usual.
My career is one of enormous stylistic diversity. I work with painting, drawing, sculpture, installation. I write. I've done a lot of performance, theater, some short films so far, and a dance thing. One was called The Disasters of War, which was there above Goya's engravings, where the actors read some texts from mothers who lost their children. We did reverse gear, in partnership with Teatro da Vertigem, during the previous government, really trying to talk about something that was happening. Now I made a different intervention, an unprecedented symphonic concert, created from the soundtrack of the film earth in trance, by Glauber Rocha, with the collaboration of Eduardo Climachauska. The song of Maldoror: Terra em Transe em Transe. Laura Vinci in the scenographic conception. In short, to say that painting is perhaps the most constant and the only constant of everything I have done and of everything I do. I started making these paintings, with a lot of material, around 1987, 1988. The paintings weigh a lot, and I always go back to them whenever I can.
The most visual part is the drawings. I drew a lot, but the painting has its own layer, something I can't define. Of course it has changed a lot. For example, it started out, back in 1980, as a period painting, with little tonal contrast. Now, it's very colorful. That's what I saw. It's something that's done in a hysterical way. And it's changed a lot. But somehow I'm following my own basic rules, which technically would be painting on the floor. I do everything on the floor. And there's a kind of crazy dripping that receives the movement. I feel like I'm going to the studio to feed an animal that's lying there, waiting for me to bring it food. And it doesn't have any mercy. Obviously there's no plan, there's nothing like that. And I think there's a difference with the rest of what I do. I think the horizon of pessimism, which permeates much of what I do, is a little absent here. Not that it's optimism, I think it's the opposite. I think there is a desperation for joy, for happiness, for positivity, which I don't feel as much in the rest of my work. This contrast is strong. There is a contrast with the more sober installations.
Painting is a very loose thing, almost exaggerated. There is a little story from my life that I always tell. When I was 40 years old, I had a retrospective. An English curator came to see me, I don't remember his name, we talked all afternoon. When it was time to leave, I went with him to the taxi. He thought the paintings were by another artist. I've never defined whether this is good or bad: knowing which of these artists is you, inside, at each moment.
ARTE!✱ - And what do you think? Does it depend on your state of mind?
Nuno Ramos – We all have darker periods and lighter periods. But I do everything simultaneously. It depends a lot on my schedule, on what I propose for myself, on the resources I have, on the painting itself. Sometimes I need a gallery to help pay for it, because they are so expensive to make. I don't know if it's just a state of mind. Maybe it's something heavier, more tragic. I know that painting reacts with a certain Apollonian despair. Let's put it that way.
At the same time, I'm very calm, but the work is very, very anxious, very identified with many things all the time, putting myself in absurd situations. Like now, for example, at the Municipal concert. Just to give you an idea, there was a choir of 80 voices. It was the entire orchestra with 70 musicians. So, you can imagine, I don't even know how to read music. I'm always in situations like that, kind of borderline. It happened, and it was really cool.
But in painting I know who sought this limiting situation. In painting it is as if I were returning to an identity, not thought out. An identity without a script. There is no script that dominates.
I wanted to be a writer before I was an artist. I spent my adolescence wanting to be a writer. Painting is wordless. I have given it a title now, but the word does not command, whereas in writing I feel that the word is always operating.
ARTE!✱ - When faced with his work, I am reminded of Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer…
Nuno Ramos – Yes, there is something about a force that I feel is similar. In Kiefer's case, it's different, because he's always working with a more scripted perspective, right? He has a whole theory about it, it's a spiritual world, etc., that's there, always hovering. There's something similar. He was an important artist for me in the beginning. His subject matter is related, yes, and the materials he uses... a kind of mud. But more symbolized. I think it was transformed into a kind of theatricalization of contemporary drama, from a point of view that was becoming increasingly conservative, in my opinion, you know? Something like a cultured European, drinking a Petrus while the world burns.
A few years ago, I visited his studio in the south of France, and I found it a bit like that. What he has is very impressive: that floor, in perspective, rustic, made of paint and burnt sticks, and the floor itself. The sky doesn't work as well anymore. There are vanishing points, it keeps escaping.
However, I think that when I saw Beuys's lard (animal fats and greases that the artist used in his works), the stones with oil, it all got to me forever. I think it's one of those influences that never goes away, because it's not just an influence of appearance, it's a real poetic influence. Incredible. Visceral. The first time I saw the lard it was a very strong thing that I've never forgotten. On the other hand, my paintings are colorful, trying to seduce. I don't know who, trying to talk to I don't know who. They're super talkative, and I feel a certain desperation. This thing nowadays, which is this excess of networks, of speech, of sound, of being, of seduction, of connection.
ARTE!✱ - In Beuys, the material he sought echoed a trauma. How does yours echo for you?
Nuno Ramos – My paintings are not austere, nor do they refuse to be. They want to echo themselves. On the other hand, they have such a material load that it is extremely painful, it is almost a body. Those are tons of paint that I keep putting on, and putting on.
I never used it in a symbolic way, much less biographical, like Beuys did. For example, I used a lot of Vaseline, not just soap and pitch. I used sand. These are just materials that I used in quantities of tons. But Vaseline was a material that really got to me. Something in between solid and liquid, it's a kind of indecision between two kingdoms. I think I belong to that a little bit. This added body gives me a kind of ethics, as if I couldn't lie too much.
I mean, when you have to take care of the material itself, so that it stays upright, doesn’t fall into a cup and slip, doesn’t melt. When you deal with it, with its physical characteristics, it seems that the work gains a truth, just in that, independent of the image, right? I mean, for me, there is a distinction between the image, which, by the way, is what bothers me in general: having a resulting image, and the material that makes the image that I would like to be alive. Not that I can, but that it could breathe, that it could be made of fungi that grow, that they were autonomous things. So, for me, the material is this space of something that I don’t control, that I need to befriend, ask permission and see if it speaks in my terms. Attribute its own truth to it. Let it weigh, let it sweat, let it breathe. All of this is what attracted me to these materials, all the ones I’ve used throughout my life.
ARTE!✱ - So, besides the paint…
Nuno Ramos – For 30 years, there has been a lot of fabric and metal. There is brass, there is aluminum, there are no objects. This is important. It is not a collage in the sense of taking something from the world. I build the paint. The material. Because it is lava, yes, you mix the oil with the encaustic in it while it is hot. I work with the hot paint, peeling it, often with gloves, other times still at the limit of my hand, but it is hot. And then it turns into a glue, a little thing that looks a bit like lava, a little thing that you throw, hot sand, something like that, and then they start to appear.
ARTE!✱ - What will we have in the exhibition besides the paintings?
Nuno Ramos – I invented a kind of countermovement. We don't have any images of the work that is being developed yet. There will be three stones, and we will make three Malevich paintings. Three Malevich paintings, made of marble powder, not colored pigment. A powder replica. So the painting has, I don't know, eight colors. We use eight. We make some cardboard models on the computer. We separate the layers, make layers of thick cardboard and then, with the powder, we recreate it exactly, like a mandala, a Malevich mandala. So, if the painting is one and a half meters by one and twenty meters, my powder replica is the same size. We place a rake along its entire length, like a harder broom, which will move three centimeters per day.
So, throughout the exhibition I will erase Malevich, let's say. There will be three erasures. My paintings will be there and his will be kind of erased. It will be a movement of life, death, construction and deconstruction. To do this sweeping, I'm developing a mechanism there in Minas. In a space where Allen Roscoe works, who does a lot of work for me, a brilliant guy, an incredible architect, a guy who did a lot, a lot of work with Amilcar [de Castro].
ARTE!✱ - And why choose a painting by Malevich?
Nuno Ramos – I'm using Malevich because, first of all, he's at the root of all 20th century painting, cubism, Russian constructivism. Of these roots, I think his was the one that most influenced our constructivism, which is very much influenced by Russian influence. Helio Oiticica's counter-reliefs seem to have been taken from one of his paintings. Ligia Clark's own animals. A looser root, I think it's very close to us.
So on one side, I have my paintings almost vomiting this origin with 300k of paint ravaging this base and that origin being undone, erased, turning into matter again.
ARTE!✱ - Projects? After Belo Horizonte?
We are going to do two exhibitions, but, interestingly, one of them is to redo a project, the Death of Houses, that I did with Flavia Albuquerque, in which I buried the houses. Three houses, which I called Three Lamas. The museum wants to do a project in light of the floods. But I went there, right after they started, got off in Floripa, took a bus, there was no airport in Porto Alegre yet, and the disaster was so big, on such a scale and violence that there was nothing that could be done. So I thought it would be interesting to redo this project with these flooded houses, rebuilt from materials. But we'll leave that for later.
