Nuno Alvarez Pessoa de Almeida Ramos (São Paulo, SP, 1960). Visual artist, writer, film director, playwright and musician. By exploring different languages, Nuno Ramos works with distinct forms and materials, bringing to light the brutality of reality.
He graduated in philosophy from the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo (FFLCH/USP) in 1982. During his undergraduate studies, he edited the magazine Almanaque-80 with poems, essays and visual arts, and the magazine Kataloki, a panorama of São Paulo poetry from that period. In 1983 he founded the Casa 7 studio with the artists Paulo Monteiro (1961), Rodrigo Andrade (1962), Carlito Carvalhosa (1961), and Fábio Miguez (1962). The group dissolved after participating in the 18ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo in 1985.
He received the Acquisition Prize at the 2º Salão Paulista de Arte Contemporânea and the International Travel Award at the 7º Salão Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1984, and the Émile Eddé scholarship from MAC USP in 1987. From 1988 to 1990, the highlights were the large paintings made of various materials, such as paraffin, rosin, canvas and metal scraps.
Until 1991, he worked mainly with paintings, and throughout the 1990s he began to explore other languages, such as writing, sculpture, installation and land art (or earthwork). In 1993, he published his first book, Cujo, and, in 1995, the object-book Balada.
From this new period, the work 111 (1992-1993) stands out, an installation that recalls the murder, in 1992, of 111 inmates by the Military Police during a rebellion in a penitentiary in São Paulo. The work presented, at the Instituto Estadual de Artes de Porto Alegre, 111 parallelepiped-shaped tombstones, covered with asphalt and bearing the names of the victims. Each parallelepiped featured a newspaper clipping on the massacre as well as ashes of pages from the Bible. On the wall, the artist showed a text of his authorship in paraffin letters on glass surfaces also filled with burnt Bible pages.
Unlike many contemporary artists, Nuno does not understand life and work as things of the same nature, between which continuity exists. For him, this relationship only occurs through forced paths, which leads him to establish radical discontinuity in his work. As the critic Rodrigo Naves (1955) states, Nuno seeks "the revelation of a raw instance of reality," "a formalization that, instead of domesticating, exponentiates the materiality of the world"[1]. Hence the importance of matter in his work, present also in the use of language, for the words are made with materials such as paraffin, and must be sculpted as such.
In 1994, he was awarded a grant by the Fundação Vitae, the same year he received the prize from the Associação Nacional de Críticos de Arte. In 2000, he won a contest held in Buenos Aires for the construction of a monument in memory of those who disappeared during the military dictatorship in that country.
He debuted in cinema in 2002 with Luz Negra. In 2005 he received the Mário Pedrosa Award as a contemporary artist from the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte (ABCA), and, in 2006, an award from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, in New York, for his body of work and contribution to the visual arts. His literary production continues with the publications of the narrative collection Pão de Corvo (2001), the compilation of fragments of his artistic production, projects and essays Ensaio Geral (2007), the winner of the Portugal Telecom Ó Prize (2008), and the short story book O Mau Vidraceiro (2010).
The critic Lorenzo Mammì (1957) compares Nuno's writing to paintings and observes the same behavior in both: a unitary vision is not possible, nor a reading in parts. For him, Nuno Ramos' works arise from an interrupted communication between body and sign that makes the work "overflow from one side or the other: in an excess of matter or an excess of meaning "[2]. Given its complexity, Nuno Ramos' work is difficult to apprehend. With several formal propositions, its unity seems to reside in the questionings it proposes.
In 2018, he directs the play A Gente se Vê por Aqui, in which the actors remain on stage for 24 hours. The approach to Brazilian culture and politics will be explored again in 2019 with the book of essays Verifique Se o Mesmo.
The work of Nuno Ramos addresses, with different languages, themes characteristic of the contemporary. From the most allusive treatment to the most provocative criticism, the artist puts into debate issues related to culture, politics, concreteness, and the potential for transformation of materials.
Notes
1. See NAVES, Rodrigo. Nuno Ramos: uma espécie de origem. In: NAVES, Rodrigo. O Vento e o Moinho: ensaios sobre arte moderna e contemporânea. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007.
2. See MAMMÌ, Lorenzo. Noites brancas. Curitiba: Casa da imagem, 1999.
NUNO Ramos. In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa2459/nuno-ramos>. Accessed on: June 9, 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7