Concurrently to the drawings and watercolours on paper, from the mid-1930s to mid-1940s, the artist also produced paintings in oil on canvas. A number of them are portraits or self-portraits. The images are expressively reductive – and not just in terms of the face. The figures appear flat, almost bodiless, constellations of blotches in various colours. Some lose their shape, combining with grotesque and surreal elements to become hybrid creatures. In Carol Rama’s portraits, only a few lines are required to form the nose and mouth. She shares such painterly reductiveness with the portraits of women by her friend and supporter Felice Casorati, a representative of Neoclassicism and one of the most renowned painters in Turin at the time. Casorati was among the first to recognize the quality of Rama’s work. In 1947 he promoted an exhibition of her works at Libreria del Bosco in Turin.

Rama largely liberates the portrait from any resemblance to the model. Sguardo (Gaze) and Untitled, both from 1947, create portraits employing a blank space: the face has now become just a pale oval. In another portrait, Untitled from 1944/45, a flickering orange is ablaze behind an accumulation of green splodges, the motif, just barely recognizable as a figure, is reduced to the extreme. In employing such an approach, Rama pushes the genre of the portrait to the limits of dissolution. She is a virtuoso in breaking art’s rules.