"MEL RAMOS : 50 YEARS OF POP ART". Collectif. Editions Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern. 2010. Imprimé en Allemagne. Fort in-8, dos droit, couverture souple cartonnée sous jaquette illustrée en couleurs. 280 pages. Textes en anglais d'Otto Letze, Maria Espinoza, Daniel J. Schreiber, Klaus Honnef & Annette Lagler, traduction par Geoffrey Garrison, illustré de 169 reproductions photographiques dont 150 en couleurs, in-texte et hors texte, de travaux de Mel Ramos. Ouvrage réalisé dans le cadre de l'exposition éponyme à la Kunsthalle Tübingen du 23 Janvier au 25 Avril 2010 puis au Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, et à l'Albertina, Vienne.

 

"Mel Ramos's images of gorgeous women, whose bodies frequently appear nude or wrapped tightly around chocolate bars, cigarette packs, or bottled drinks, contrast with the artist's own pithy statement about his art. Created with a palette typical of Pop Art, the Californian artist's works are populated by pinup girls and beauty queens; in fact, such women have become his hallmark and have made him one of the great artists of Pop Art. Ramos appropriates and parodies the trivial, glamorous imagery of the advertising industry by borrowing from commercial advertisements, magazines, and the entertainment world. Through his work, he exposes the techniques of suggestion exploited in commercial design, magazine ads, publicity, and film, and explicitly reveals what all of these fields have implied since the nineteen-sixties-sex sells. When Ramos surrealistically pairs his nude women drenched in suntan oil with everyday objects of consumer culture, the goal of advertising is made thematically manifest in a precise way: the female body becomes a consumer good, and the good itself then becomes an object of desire. As is the case with so much Pop Art, Ramos's more than fifty years of production requires closer examination. Considered from a satiricaI-SurreaIistic perspective, his work reveals itself to be complex, carefully considered, profound, and masterfully executed in terms of its craftmanship, and all of these characteristics earn it an important place in the history of Pop Art and in that of Western art in general…" Otto Letze.

 

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