During the reign of Benito Mussolini, an enormous carved relief of the dictator’s head loomed over the streets of Rome, his downcast gaze surveilling the Italian public night and day. The oversize, unblinking eyes served as a reminder of the regime’s extensive network of informants tasked with suppression and censorship. When the fascist government shuttered Carol Rama’s first-ever exhibition, staged at Galleria Faber in her hometown of Turin, in 1945, it cited obscenity on account of her liberated female figures. The young artist, unmarried and essentially orphaned, heeded the warning. She changed her name from Olga Carolina Rama to Carol Rama and developed other means of representing the body.
When you entered Rama’s intimate exhibition recently on view at the Aspen Art Museum—small but significant given that the artist has had only two other surveys in the US—you were immediately confronted by a multitude of unblinking eyes: glass taxidermy eyes, long-lashed doll eyes, and smoky bedroom eyes rendered in watercolor. The experience recreated the surveillance that Rama endured throughout her adolescence, effectively drawing the viewer into a similarly heightened, self-conscious state of bodily awareness. This collection of ocular works, spanning more than fifty years of the self-taught artist’s career, exemplifies Rama’s ceaseless engagement with the body. These are not the Surrealists’ discarnate eyes floating in a cloudy sky; they are animate, desirous, and derisive. By endowing her psychosexual watercolor figures, as well as the fragmented and abstracted bodies that followed, with outward-gazing eyes, Rama grants them an independent subjectivity and influence. In this way, she establishes the suffering, amatory, and deviant body as a site of resistance.
Carol Rama, Senza titolo, 1944. © Archivio Carol Rama, Torino.
The five watercolors from the quashed 1945 exhibition, arranged across the gallery’s back wall, offered the viewer an accessible entry into the underrecognized artist’s life and practice. References to a childhood marked by the financial collapse of her family’s factory, the institutionalization of her mother, the death of her father by suicide, and the repeated bombing of Turin during World War II permeate Rama’s early imagery (and beyond). Of her visits to her mother in the psychiatric hospital, Rama wrote, “a great happiness was born because I didn’t understand that I was in a madhouse environment and the freedom I found in these people with their tongues sticking out.” More than a hundred of her early, life-affirming paintings depict these bodies—that were socially dehumanized for being psychologically or physically disabled—as emancipated from repressive societal conventions and the pressures of daily life.
Rama portrays the pale-pink figure in Engi (1939), another meticulously detailed watercolor, upside down, reclining as if on a bed with her knees bent. The artist attends to the woman’s nude body as she might her own, indexing the hair growing from her areolae like the attenuated petals of a dandelion, the heavy-charcoal shadow enlarging her eyes and the rosy, unfurled lips of her vulva. The image recalls the artist’s description of erotics as “the rejection of any prudery” and an embrace of a detail-oriented sensuality: “the body being scrutinized and dissected in its anatomical parts, in all its bits and functions.” This insistently feminine perspective asserts the existence and valence of a female gaze. By portraying the woman as desirous rather than desirable, Rama accentuates her agency. In Dorina (1945), a woman grips the emerald-green serpent that emerges from the orifice between her spread legs. Beneath her Dionysian laurels and lavender-painted eyes, her red tongue—the same shade as her lacquered nails—extends toward the snake. She is not a machine for reproduction controlled by men for the benefit of the state. To the contrary, Dorina, like many of Rama’s women, is shown engaging in solo sex acts that serve no purpose beyond her own sensual pleasure and erotic satisfaction. She is ungovernable and indignant, a fact emphasized by her gaze fixed firmly on the observer: both an invitation to look and a dare to intervene.
Carol Rama, Opera n. 11 (Renards), 1938. © Archivio Carol Rama, Torino.
In the 1950s, the decade after the show of watercolors was shuttered, Rama experimented with various methods of abstraction before adopting her signature collages in the 1960s, which she called “bricolages,” a term first ascribed to them by the poet Edoardo Sanguineti. In urgent material compositions that subverted the tenets of figuration, she envisaged the body as something fragmented, cropped, metamorphosized, and mutilated. Among these is Bricolage (1967), in which more than sixty eyes, with amber, hazel, and celadon irises, peer out from the depths of a densely layered canvas. The tension between the various pigments—crimson, black, umber, and white—and haptic textures—spackled, coagulated, brushy, and splintered—engenders a visceral somatic presence. At the center lies a crater surrounded by splotches of red paint that resembles a wound in the quasi-body. Its excess and tactility seduce and repel in equal measure not unlike the experience of having a physical body, animating a kind of touching, even while you keep your hands to yourself. The coagulated form evokes a sense of the abject, something repressed and forbidden, now exposed. The sixty eyes affirm that there is nothing to hide—not even bodily fluids.
Whatever has been deemed unfit for public consumption and polite discourse, Rama exonerates from degradation. In Untitled (1986), for example, a nacreous, milk-colored liquid that bears an uncanny resemblance to seminal fluid is pooled and dripped across a black background. In the middle is a cluster of cerulean doll’s eyes with rows of lashes affixed directly above their irises. The bespattered liquid in an earlier painting, Untitled (1967), resembles dried blood, perhaps menstrual, in defiance of an age-old taboo. The doll’s eyes, scattered across the imitation blood stain, restore a sense of humanity regularly denied to the condemned substance, even as it animates all of our soft bodies.
Carol Rama, Senza titolo (Serpente), 1968. © Archivio Carol Rama, Torino.
Carol Rama, Bricolage, 1967. Photo by Daniel Pérez, Courtesy of Aspen Art Museum.
In various other untitled works created during the same period, Rama drew images of explosions and inscribed them with the mathematical formulas underlying the atomic bomb—like many avant-garde artists, she was haunted by reportage on the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To these compositions, she also added copious doll’s and taxidermy eyes, involving the viewer in an intimate engagement with the activated subject. Their wide-open stares also manifest the sharp political consciousness of the artist and serve as a reminder that the brutality of the bombs was not only witnessed by the victims but by the entire world.
The mangled, manic creature in the final painting in the exhibition, Cluster bonbs [sic] units ce ne sono certe che sanno di polvere da sparo, altre di aglio (Cluster Bonbs Units There Are Some the Taste of Gunpowder, Some of Garlic) (1969), appears an image of madness. Skeins of tarry paint, approximating disjointed appendages, extend from a bulbous sphere at the center of the yellowed canvas. Scarlet spray paint shimmers from what may constitute a head, torso, or womb. The red dash toward the top recalls the wagging tongues of the artist’s liberated women. The cluster of variant eyes—some with the vertical split pupils of snakes, others large and amber like those of a crocodile—implies the embrace of the animalistic. The frenetic energy of this partitioned and hybridized figure registers as a sense of vitality. The work’s title, with its reference to cluster bombs, underscores what is visually palpable: that this figure has been subjected to unfathomable violence. Insanity, Rama suggests, is the only reasonable reaction. Similar to her treatment of the psychiatric patients, she imbues these victims of brutal atrocities with a subjectivity and vigor that persists in the face of social spectacle and political decimation.
Across materials and modes of making, Rama empowered her subjects, directly challenging Fascism’s effort to deprive people of their agency. While the artist was painting her liberated women in the Appassionata series under Mussolini’s watchful gaze, Walter Benjamin was penning his now-famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” condemning Fascism’s aestheticization of politics, advocating instead for art that can’t be passively consumed. Rama answered the call, activating her subjects and implicating her audience, while exposing the violence of economic inequality maintained by social hierarchies. Installed in a billionaire-filled ski-resort town, in a glass-cube museum designed by a star architect, Rama’s art—full of watching subjects—felt urgent and defiant.
