My artworks are usually structured on multiple visual and semantic layers of contrasting iconographies from which a concept emerges. For the Wonderland series I resorted to found objects, mostly containers/labels of consumer goods, and pornographic images, all of which morphs into a sort of palimpsest when superimposed on abstract expressionist backgrounds. The series comprises several paintings on canvas, 9 assemblages on plywood (The POLIsexyGONS suite), and a number of works made on a cheesy wallpaper pattern stamped vinyl that compose The Wonder Banners suite.

 

This new series analyzes the recurrence of sex in commercial advertising, and women in their double roll as a target and a commodified “object of desire” for those ad campaigns. As Marshall McLuhan noted, “the ad men are constantly breaking through into the Alice in Wonderland territory behind the looking glass, which is the world of sub-rational impulses and appetites.” This sex narrative carries a dark metaphor of our zeitgeist, while emulating the obscenity level of certain social, economic and political events we are currently witnessing in Europe and North America. Sex served as a side dish for finances and politics or a naughty collateral for toxic mortgages.

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RLR

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"Irony and kitsch are the two main resources threading through the discourse of the series. López-Ramos’ mordant approach is deeply rooted in an extended feeling of disappointment and decay experienced daily by common people in our globalized world, where trust and a sense of the future become merely a mirage, achievable only through the fallacy of the mass media.

Rafael López-Ramos’ Wonderland unveils for us the subterfuge that underlies the seemingly harmless seductions of advertising. The complex apparatus of subjugation and ideological manipulation embodied in the media thus revealed, Wonderland, with obvious contact points with the work of Lewis Carroll, emerges as an unsettling parable of power and its control mechanisms, where a longed-for imaginary world of marvels and miracles becomes its precise opposite."

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Janet Batet, ArtNexus Magazine, issue 91, Dec-Feb 2014, p.132.

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"Los situacionistas llamaron détournement a una práctica artística que consistía en tomar una mercancía y transformarla en un objeto artístico, de forma tal que se negara a sí misma como mercancía y, por lo tanto, subvirtiera el imperativo de consumir que caracteriza al capitalismo contemporáneo.

Los collages recientes de Rafael López-Ramos parecen seguir una lógica semejante. En su caso son las estrategias publicitarias las que se vuelven contra sí mismas. López-Ramos se sirve de los anuncios que aparecen en las revistas, los recorta y los traslada a sus lienzos. En particular, acude al desnudo femenino para desmontar el carácter de mercancía sexual que distorsiona el erotismo. Como han observado numerosos pensadores contemporáneos, en la actualidad lo que genera complejos de culpa no son las prohibiciones sobre el goce; sino el hecho de no haber disfrutado lo suficiente y no satisfacer las demandas del placer. López-Ramos presenta un mundo banalizado y opresivo precisamente porque está inundado de contenidos sexuales."

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Ernesto Menéndez-Conde, Arte al Día International magazine

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"Lopez-Ramos’ artwork inherits the rebellious spirit and legacy of most of the 20th century, from Rauschenberg’s Combines and Lichtenstein’s paradoxes to Bad Painting, passing trough Malevich and Magritte, the multi-imagery of David Salle, the disturbing messages of Brazilian political artists Meireles and Oiticica, to the recognizable civic pathos of the dynamic, anti-establishment 1980s Cuban art. Some of the acrylic on canvas featured in “Wonderland” are a sort of crossroads, as well as a power visual cocktail." (...)

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"The Beverage You Are About to Enjoy Is Extremely Hot (acrylic on canvas, 2011) is perhaps Lopez-Ramos’ most aggressive depiction of the human game of reifications and alienation. A cartoonish Captain America -the very symbol of the most militarily powerful country in the world-watches over us, with a visible bulge in his pants, in an intimidating posture, while a fantasy schoolgirl masturbates with a dildo. The citizen/consumer sees this scene and surrenders unwittingly to the pastiche of an obscene but persistent visual trap we have built around us, playing the dual role of consumers and commodities."

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Joaquin Badajoz, ​​"Wonderland: The Many Images of Misrepresentation", Art Districts Magazine.

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