A new survey at Palais de Tokyo continues the search, from trash-confected sculptures and UV costumes to colourful abstractions like a subaquatic Kandinsky
His real name was and remains a street-gnostic secret. We know that aged nineteen in 1979 he became Rammellzee by deed poll – or more cryptically RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, announcing at the outset an obsession with the graphic force and fantasy-building potential of the letter. Ornament as crime: though his own graffiti career was limited – he was more polemicist and seer than prolific tagger of stainless-steel subway cars – it was with New York’s night-crawling writers that Rammellzee was first associated. Also with early hip-hop: in 1983 he released the 12-inch Beat Bop, with his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat as producer and sleeve artist. And it was as a visual artist himself – painter, sculptor, costume maker – that Rammellzee was best known during the 1980s. He died in 2010, his estate now represented by Jeffrey Deitch. Part one of a two-part exhibition that continues in 2026 at CAPC, Bordeaux, this is the first major survey in Europe of Rammellzee’s work.
An almost conventional painting show curves through the Palais de Tokyo’s basement galleries: colourful abstractions like a subaquatic Kandinsky, physically taxing experiments with spraypaint and resin. It’s Rammellzee the manipulator and prophet of textual forms, however, who really thrills alongside these paintings. In his own tags (represented in this show by monochrome graffiti on a large roller blind) and those of graffiti-writer friends such as Phase 2, Dondi White and Futura 2000, he spied or divined the glyphic shapes of fantastic war machines. The spines and swells of letters are given sci-fi names in his sketches and writings – ‘starbased extendor’, ‘harpoonic whip launcher’ – and such two-dimensional ciphers translate into sculptural forms. Sometimes these are sleek and sinister, imperial barges festooned with firearms or lasers. Others are toylike: the Letter Racers (1988–91) are small vehicles that could be held in the hand, or as here suspended from the ceiling, their doll-body fragments in giddy pursuit of each other, like a Wacky Races cartoon raid on the Death Star. Or perhaps the Pentagon. In the era of Ronald Reagan’s own Star Wars fantasy and a renewed Cold War, Rammellzee contrived a military-imaginary complex out of real and fantastical elements of America’s weaponised culture.
Rammellzee’s Black futurism puts him firmly in a lineage of writers, artists and (especially) musicians: Sun Ra, George Clinton, Nona Hendryx, Cybotron. When he backed away from the gallery scene at the end of the 1980s, it was to make his own music and work on increasingly ambitious trash-confected sculptures in the Tribeca live work space he called his Battle Station. His sculptures, models and costumes are the most spectacular objects at the Palais de Tokyo, the costumes bathed in UV light and marshalled on low plinths like a buried army from the future: hieratic, totemic, with the look of ancient high priests or a child’s-eye view of Transformer-like figures endlessly unfolding, to ever more lethal scale. Style, for Rammellzee, was expansion itself; that’s what links his machines, symbols, linguistic theories, bristling samurai costume and aliens in exoskeletons of found plastic. No surprise, then, that he was fascinated by medieval illuminated manuscripts, where the monks added new images and flourishes with no logical end – wild style as cloistered, or studio-bound, revolt.
Alphabeta Sigma (Side A) at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, through 11 May
From the May 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
