Ramona

Ramona

This print portrays, in profile, a character at the center of Antonio Berni’s imaginative universe: Ramona Montiel, a fictional prostitute who ascends from apathetic, middle-class youth to a decadent existence as paramour to clerics and generals in the upper echelons of Argentine society. Her male counterpart Juanito Laguna charted an inverse course, migrating from the countryside to Buenos Aires’ shantytowns. From 1958 to 1977, Berni followed the exploits of his two anti-heroes in a highly idiosyncratic, realist style. He materialized their themes, from abject poverty to excessive luxury, in collages and assemblages constructed from the recycled refuse of contemporary life.

Berni developed his own printing technique—xilo-collage-relief—with which to embody these subjects. A water-soaked sheet of paper was molded onto every bulge and crevice of a carved woodblock that Berni had built up with textured elements like coins, metal hardware, and plaster moldering. Results like this one, in which Ramona’s hard features recede behind forms suggesting lace and heavy ornament, confront the conditions of injustice that would render body and object interchangeable.

Read more about Berni’s technique in this conservation case study by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Antonio Berni

1965

2013. AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States (OAS). All rights reserved.

Still Image

xilo-collage relief

14.25 x 10 in.