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