Old Monsters (Nuno Ramos and the formless)

Abstract

This article analyzes the visual and literary work of Nuno Ramos based on an event that occurred at the 1989 São Paulo Biennial, when some of the artist’s paintings, exhibited in a non-air-conditioned environment under strong sunlight, underwent a process of disintegration. This traumatic event had a series of aesthetic consequences for Nuno Ramos’s career, as he not only began to remake these lost paintings but also to explore a formless and catastrophic potential for art—not only in the paintings he created in the following years but also in other works, such as his performances and even in literary texts.