The work of Nuno Ramos (São Paulo, 1960) occupies a territory of indeterminacy and transit, between matter and sign, from the concrete to mud. His production spans painting, sculpture, installation, literature, theater, and music, as a continuous investigation of the limits that separate these fields. As Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre and Mario Cámara observe, his work can be understood as “rehearsing, again and again, the path that leads from the body and matter to language.”

His body of work thus forms a set of isolated or combined attempts to embed artistic practice within matter; to create provisional arrangements between antagonisms; to concatenate movements and stage scenes. By operating through temporality and duration, his works move toward the limits of matter, language, and the art object, rendering the artist’s own agency and control fragile. At times vivid, at others solemn, and in constant dialogue with key figures in Brazilian literature, samba, cinema, and intellectual life, the artist’s production also reflects on the country’s political-historical and cultural realities.

In the passage between body and language, materiality becomes a field of forces arranged in unstable configurations, in which the work constitutes itself as process. The instability of sand, the retention of organic traces on the surface, petroleum jelly inscribing words onto the floor, and pitch spreading outward — form never stabilizes; it remains in a state of imminence.

This investigation runs throughout the artist’s production. By refusing to propose a stable synthesis between these fields, he operates within their friction and mutual contamination, allowing matter to acquire discursive density while granting material weight to words. Over the course of his trajectory, the work affirms this unstable territory where body, matter, and language intersect, configuring situations in which permanence is always provisional.

Such an exploration of thresholds finds in the figure of the tomb one of its recurring forms, as Eduardo Sterzi observes in relation to Nuno Ramos’s work. This form, however, is not conceived as a definitive endpoint, but as the stage upon which a paradoxical action unfolds. “The tomb, here, is not a place of rest-in-peace but, on the contrary, the problematic stage of a scene that is radically conflictual: if the moment of death — in a final parallel with the moment of birth — is, according to the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, always unsettled, deserving therefore the name of agony, that is, struggle,” writes Sterzi, “it is no less agonistic, in the eyes of the artist, the life within death.”

Thus, in his work, materiality never assumes an inert or fixed character. The artist chooses materials that remain active. Exemplary is his use of viscous or unstable substances — such as wax, paraffin, and petroleum jelly, as well as compressed sand and accumulated lime, among others. What is at stake is a confrontation with the possibility of loss, in which constructive solutions are embraced whose precariousness and tension become visible and imminent. In this sense, earth, in his work, becomes a surface that preserves in death what once stirred upon it.

In this sense, notions of loss, precariousness, and instability may at times be associated with reflections on Brazilian history. The installation 111 (1992) materializes this impulse: conceived in response to the killing of 111 inmates at the Carandiru penitentiary in São Paulo by the Military Police, the work is described by Ramos as a gesture of “burying all that.” This burial is at once an act of memory and of denunciation — an unstable preservation that refuses to silence violence.

The tragic dimension of Brazilian history also resonates in the artist’s recurring dialogue with figures from Cinema Novo and samba, such as Nelson Cavaquinho, whose “black light” illuminates a “colorless theater.” As Alva Martinez Teixeiro observes, the compositions of the Rio de Janeiro musician offer a traditional and popular matrix that merges with the artistic magma of Nuno Ramos. The sambista lends the artist a tragic orality that permeates his writing and the series of drawings and performances Antígona and Cassandra (2018), which likewise confront the violence of Brazilian politics.

In Nuno Ramos’s work, the idea of the gift may be understood as a gesture that sensitively questions the productivist and utilitarian logics that traverse contemporary culture. The gift emerges as an opening to excess, risk, and exposure. To give, in this context, implies accepting the possibility of loss and acknowledging what escapes the logic of equivalence. Artistic production is thus oriented less toward efficiency and more toward availability to process, embracing instability as a constitutive dimension of experience.

Within this horizon, notions such as waste, accumulation, and destruction become structuring dimensions of the work. Waste can be understood as a refusal of the economy of exact measure, affirming a mode of making that admits overflow and expenditure. Accumulation, in turn, is not reducible to the quantitative sum of materials, but configures layers, densities, and sedimentations that render time and transformation visible. Destruction appears less as a spectacular gesture than as a continuous process of erosion, decomposition, and rearrangement, in which the work remains in tension between form and disintegration. By mobilizing precarious or constantly mutating materials, the artist displaces the notion of the artwork as a fixed and fully assimilable object. Permanence and ruin coexist, establishing a temporality marked by duration, suspension, and imminence.

In O globo da morte de tudo (2012), created in collaboration with Eduardo Climachauska, two interlaced steel globes and four shelving units holding approximately 1,500 objects — organized into the categories Beer, Ceramics, Porcelain, and Ink — await the action of motorcyclists who, in a single performance, partially destroy them. The work stages a contemporary ritual of sacrifice, renewing reflections on systems of exchange that elude mercantile logic. The installation offers itself as an affirmation of loss as symbolic value within a world governed by accumulation.

Another persistent movement in Nuno Ramos’s work is that of return. To repeat, duplicate, and copy functions like the incessant repetition of a word until it detaches from its meaning, thus producing operations of displacement. In the back-and-forth between matter and language, he establishes a field of tension in which each gesture reappears in another form — at times as residue, at others as echo, at others still as ruin. Within this context, repetition restages images or reinscribes words onto new supports; the copy is converted into difference, and the double into fracture.

The artist activates a sedimentary logic in which each new layer contains the previous ones while simultaneously altering them. The work thus takes shape as an unstable archive: a system in constant reconfiguration. These operations outline a return of the same, always under different conditions, challenging the very idea of stable originality.