Allen Jones, a painter of shared territory to that of Christina Ramberg, referred to his work as dealing with “predicaments”. Obviously there is nothing novel about the sentiment, but in relation to this “type” of painting it rather succinctly cuts to the heart of the matter: sexuality is a predicament.
The semiology of sexuality or the study/depiction of sexual signs/imagery is a dilemma of transcription: the transubstantiation of mental image into plastic object and the resultant ambiguity as to the success of the translation. Of course all human difficulties result in an imbroglio of some sort of language, but it is unequivocal that one of the most pungent viewings of humanity, in the ill-throws of translation, is sex.
Ramberg’s ambiguity is not centered around her “subjects” enjoyment or displeasure, of that there is no question; the subjects are at least very uncomfortable. Her indeterminateness is more of a smog, swirling around her subject’s status as objects or victims. Coitus is a murky, unctuous volley between the miserly and the hospitable; Ramberg is explicit in depicting characters bound to their receivers and the resultant enigmatic losses. It is hard to tell whether her “women” actually lose faces, hands and limbs or whether they are bound or held from sight. Or whether their situation is self-inflicted.
Ramberg painted an aftermath of strange, gauzy, symmetrical delicacy. Her bruise-tone work almost has the touch of a poet-mortician. The bodies and torsos are less prey-in-strife and more inanimate-decorated-entity (this is definitely an expression shared with the aforementioned Jones). Although, mummified in corsetry and bandage-like foundations, they are not without their fetishistic allure. One does not have to see The Night Porter to know that the grist of sexuality is often misperception translated into ritualistic deviation. Sexuality is ambiguity. Christina Ramberg died at the age of 49 in 1995.