Contrato [Contract]

Contrato [Contract]

  • 2016
  • Collage (newspaper on cardboard)
  • 113,2 x 83,3 x 14 cm
  • Cat. E_153
  • Acquired in 2017
By:
Yolanda Romero Gómez

Sara Ramo's work plays with everyday reality, with materials familiar to us, as she takes a critical, playful, experimental look at the objects that she produces. She works directly with elements found all around us and reconfigures them so that they become strange and foreign. She does not see this alteration of the natural order of things as a mere exercise in form, but as a way of producing new systems of meaning. Sara Ramo is the heir to an entire cultural tradition that challenges the purely utilitarian, science-based concept of the contemporary world. She introduces notions of mysticism, mythology and magic, and poses the problem of the links between human beings and objects based solely on use. By breaking up that paradigm, she enables new narrative possibilities to emerge. In her own words 'I work with objects which are close at hand and familiar to everyone. From them, I create poetic content'.

Her works Contract (2016) and Contract II (2016) are cases in point. They are collages made from cuttings from the Financial Times, which is considered as the world's most influential financial daily. Contract has its origins in the crisis of 2007, which resulted in world-wide economic collapse and led a large proportion of society to seek to learn why it had happened. Millions of people all over the world were trapped by obligations arising from contracts for speculative financial products concerning which they had not been properly informed. The incomprehensible, jargon-filled language of newspapers and documentaries specialising in financial and economic matters only exacerbated the lack of understanding and discouragement of those hit by the crisis. Her use of piled-up cuttings from newspapers, which viewers are unable to read, symbolises the incomprehensible nature of those financial contracts for one of the parties involved. Like a mask covering the identity of its wearer, contracts become instruments destined to have harmful effects on those on the other side of the deal, thus revealing their true power.

Yolanda Romero Gómez

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Sara Ramo
Madrid 1975

Sara Ramo obtained her degree in Fine Arts in Spain but soon moved to Brazil, where she has lived for most of each year ever since. In 2007 Ice Cream, a book on contemporary art published by Phaidon, included her in its select list of the one hundred highest-profile emerging artists of the year.

She bases her work on everyday objects, which she transforms using games and language-related techniques. In her own words: 'My works do not so much belong to the everyday world as transform it'. Common elements such as a newspaper and a calendar are turned into something unfamiliar, but without severing the links that make them recognisable. This metamorphosis of objects is not constrained to a formalist discourse: the sense of strangeness and changed meaning is intended to make us more sensitive to objects which we have seen so often that they no longer hold any significance for us. Ramo thus focuses on art which has a hint of positivism but is based on the unconscious, on the mystical, on the absurd and indeed on the magical. Her points of reference can be found in the Dadaist and Duchampian ready-made aidé, which was based on the creative potential of random chance. Her work also harks back to the Brazilian art of the 1970s.

Sara Ramo has taken part in the Sharjah Biennial (UAE, 2013), the Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, Brazil), the Venice Biennale of 2009 and the São Paulo Biennial of 2010. Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at the Photographer’s Gallery (London, 2009-2010), the Almagro Contemporary Art Centre (Ciudad Real, 2011), the Matadero (Madrid, 2014), the La Panera Art Centre (Lleida, 2014-2015), the Banco do Brasil Cultural Centre (São Paulo, 2005), the Dos de Mayo Centre (Madrid, 2012), the Eva Klabin Foundation (Río de Janeiro, 2012), the Alcalá 31 Gallery (Madrid, 2019) and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2019-2020). Distinctions received by Ramos include a Cité Internationale des Arts grant (2008) and a Plastic Arts grant from the Botín Foundation (2014).

Isabel Tejeda

 
«(UN)COMMON VALUES. Two Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art», National Bank of Belgium (Brussels, 2022).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.