Selected Works : 1983 — 1991

RAMMELLZEE

28 May

About

Sébastien Bertrand is pleased to present a selection of paintings and works on paper by Rammellzee, highlighting the artist’s radical exploration of language, architecture, and symbolic warfare during the 1980s and 1990s.

A singular and uncompromising figure of the New York underground, Rammellzee developed a body of work that defies categorization. Painter, theorist, performer, musician, and self-proclaimed “letter racer,” he conceived an artistic language where graffiti, science-fiction, medieval symbolism, hip-hop culture, and speculative technology collide.

The works gathered in this exhibition reveal the full intensity of his pictorial universe. Executed on canvas, cardboard, wood, and paper, these works combine spray paint, ink, acrylic, metallic pigments, collage, markers, and industrial materials in dense and unstable compositions. Surfaces appear charged with velocity; part battlefield, part cosmic map, part coded manuscript.

In paintings such as Bishop Tower One Cathedral Two Never Withdraw from the Burn (1986), architectural structures dissolve into armored signs and luminous debris. Elsewhere, in works like Geo Hammer/Trouble Dome (1989) or Atomic Note (1991), symbols, vectors, and floating graphic structures operate like fragments of an unknown language – letters, diagrams, and abstract forms drift between machine, map, and cosmic interface. Even smaller-format works and collages retain this explosive energy, where fragments, overlays, and improvised materials generate and aesthetic of constant transformation.

Central to Rammellzee’s practice was the theory he called Gothic Futurism. According to the artist, the alphabet itself had been historically disciplined and controlled by institutional power. His response was to liberate language through visual warfare: reengineering letters as autonomous entities capable of resistance and mutation. In his work, writing is never passive. It attacks, shields, accelerates, and survives.

What emerges from these paintings is more than an extension of graffiti culture into the gallery space. It’s the construction of an entirely original cosmology. Rammellzee fused the energy of early hip-hop with medieval iconography, aerospace aesthetics, comic-book imagery, and homemade technological fantasies. His works operate simultaneously as paintings, diagrams, coded narratives, and performative objects.

Materials themselves play a critical role in this universe. Cardboard, collage elements, fluorescent pigments, metallic paints, film strips, and found imagery create works that feel assembled from urban debris and futuristic relics alike. In Knotted Minds (1991), layers of spray paint and cinematic fragments suggest a fractured information network – a visual field where memory, media, and language collapse into one another.

Long perceived as an outsider figure, Rammellzee is now recognized as one of the most visionary artists of his generation. His influence extends far beyond contemporary painting, resonating through music, fashion, experimental culture, and digital aesthetics.

This exhibition focuses on the material and pictorial force of his work; paintings that function less as static images than as living systems – unstable, aggressive, and perpetually in motion. Through them, Rammellzee imagined a world in which signs themselves struggle for autonomy, and where language remains a site of resistance.