Nuno Ramos is a Brazilian artist based in São Paulo. Ramos gained early recognition in the 1980s through his association with Casa 7, a group of young paulista painters who sought to move beyond the modernist aesthetics that had dominated Brazilian art in the mid-century. Largely self-trained, painters of the Casa 7 group were known for the kinetics, vibrance, and velocity of their art, which rebelled against the staid geometries of their parents’ generation, and which critics associated with the violence of a newly urbanized Brazil notorious for the chaos of its cities. Casa 7 paintings were also recognizable for their low-grade materials: industrial paints applied to inexpensive craft paper.
Often caked in layers of paint that rose in topographical relief, Ramos’s compositions began to incorporate other materials, including debris taken from São Paulo’s industrial urban landscape. In the 1990s, these compositions evolved into large-scale sculptural and multimedia installations that filled entire rooms. Now among Ramos’s most well-known works, his installations luxuriate in the layered significance and materiality of the items that compose them.
The visual poetics of Ramos’s installations have a prominent antecedent in Brazilian art: the concrete poetry printed by Brazilian avant gardists of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Honoring this inheritance by endeavoring both to extend and to surpass it, Ramos began publishing his own poetic texts, some of which form a part of his installation ensembles. For his textual works, Ramos has earned some of Brazil’s highest literary honors, including the Portugal Telecom Prize and multiple nominations for the Jabuti Prize. Meanwhile, his artistic practice has further enlarged to encompass film and video, as well as theater and performance art.