THE PASSION ACCORDING TO FRANK

One of the first excerpts from Frank Ramme's ongoing "Manifesto for a New Religious Art" describes his own paintings as "stations of the cross in the temple of ambivalence". Ramme's visionary art plays with the idea of a transcendence rendered moot by paradox and in the name of a dazzling visual display: the creation of images as puzzle and puzzlement. Meaning in his work is not the result of a dialectical climax, but instead the remains of the shock, and explosion, of dueling sets of evidence, in the precise etymological sense of "what appears to sight." Frank's paintings, stations of the cross, thus show passion to be double, or at least double-edged: both a "strong emotion" and an itinerary of sacrifice; at times even self-sacrifice. In the first sense, passion begins and ends in the body, is non-transcendent, and its images depend on the sating of physical desire. In the second sense, passion as transcendence, the image tortures the body and ends in ecstasy. But the third and constant element in Frank's visual passion is irony; sometimes even plain humor. The passion according to Frank is therefore unlike the passion according to Giotto, Michaelangelo or El Greco, although it does recall, and contain all of these. Ramme stylizes his figures to the point of caricature, or else, to the point of alluding to an impossible cross between theology and the comics. "My angels," he says in another of his excerpts, "are fierce and marshall with a powerful, trans-dimensional sexual hunger." We really can't take him seriously. Then again, perhaps we must. Ramme's visions are fiercely, aggresively figurative, and with those figures he assembles "acts of religious integrity and ultimate sacrifice." Duality is Ramme's peculiar theme. Yet instead of the binary oppositions that traditionally structure all meaning - we have doubles that cancel each other out. Meaning is thereby empied out in a system of visual opposites that, after mutual cancelation, remain there for sheer visual value, display and intrigue. Thus the narrative of Ramme's paintings - which of course includes his playful captions - literally goes nowhere, except perhaps onto the sheer act of display and seeing. It first seduces us into seeing, and then goes on to show us the seduction, the trap - repeatedly and without end. Frank Ramme's paintings are moral conundrums at which we can, alternatively, laugh or cry, but must always wonder at. We wonder, first, at his lucid sense of composition; and right after that, at his picture's narrativepotential, their literally pregnant imagery, as if he had wanted to freeze in time strange ceremonies for our visual desight and endless speculation. But his "morality scenes" are anything but conceptual dryscapes. He stares directly "into the face of creation", and what he finds there, and show us, with unbounded courage, is the sweet sad image of humanity.

                                                                                         Enrico Mario Santi,  2004