D. Kuspit and L. K. Meisel, Mel Ramos Pop Art Fantasies : The Complete Paintings, New York, 2004, p. 146 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
Mel Ramos is best-known for his paintings of nude women, pulled from pages of pin-ups and depicted with ketchup bottles, cigars and other commercial products which are easily read as phallic objects. His paintings represent a collective fantasy reflected through art history and mass media.The nudes themselves are Playboy Magazine meets Madame Tussauds; seductive and erotic with a certain Surrealistic and overly-perfect appeal.
“Ramos renders the glamour girl in all her physical, theatrical beauty and at the same time subverts her glamour by pairing it with a consumer product that has its own peculiar seductiveness, theatricality, and transcendence. Ramos in effect reverses the classical priorities: the female nude becomes the attribute of the consumer product, symbolizing its power and ‘Sex’ appeal while it continues to symbolize her consumability.” (D. Kuspuit, Mel Ramos: Pop Art Fantasies, The Complete Paintings, NewYork 2004, p. 17)
In addition to the nudes depicted with commercial objects Mel Ramos completed an extensive series of works which incorporated images of nude women interacting with wild animals. These paintings allude to the age-old myth of beauty and the beast; a myth which has been depicted in painted form since ancient times. In Gnu, 1973, the nude brunette straddles a wildebeest while both she and the animal glance back at the viewer in a manner which might suggest the viewer’s gaze is not entirely welcome. We have stumbled across a scene where beauty has once again tamed the wild beast. “Combining his lovely ladies with jungle animals could be rather grotesque and disturbing; however, with Ramos’s vast sense of humor it brings nothing but smiles. Despite how big and dangerous the beasts may be in life, in Ramos’ hands they are nothing more than cuddly bears, and some say they are the artist’s depiction of himself.” (D. Kuspuit, Mel Ramos: Pop Art Fantasies, The Complete Paintings, NewYork 2004, p. 126)
Mel Ramos is an American Pop artist best known for his paintings of female nudes alongside brand logos. His depictions of women with everyday products celebrate aspects of popular culture represented in mass media and advertising. Like his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Ramos was inspired by comic books and grew up drawing cartoons and characters from their pages. The artist's works, including paintings, prints and works on paper, feature in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.