Carlo Ramous

Carlo Ramous (1926–2003), neglected protagonist of Italian sculpture of the second half of the 20th century, with his work passed through the main stages of modern art reaching dimensions typical of Land Art at the beginning of the Seventies. After the restoration of a meaningful group of big sculptures, some of which are placed in public spaces in Milan, this volume presents Ramous’s path in its extent and complexity, clarifying all of the steps of his stylistic evolution.
From the beginning he had created artistic relationships with architects and designers which lead him to the creation of significant sculptural works applied on religious and industrial buildings in the mid Fifties. The façades of churches in the outskirts of Milan and factories in Italy and abroad became spaces for big figurative or ornamental decorations which melded with the building itself. However, it was in the Seventies that Ramous reached an articulated conception of sculpture as Land Art. At that time he abandoned his previous experimentations with lines and material to reach the creation of geometrical forms with clear edges which articulate themselves in the space that surrounds them in a balanced form. Thinking about plastic volumes, which had already interested the Futurists, Ramous conceived sculptures as shapes ready to detach from the ground and soar to the sky. As Giuseppe Marchiori wrote in 1973, “the clear edges of Ramous’s sculptures […] need to stand out in a wide space, for example in the urban ‘landscape’. There is a unique relationship between the monumental ‘signs’ and the anonymous backgrounds of the suburbs”.

Milan, Triennale, July - September 2017