Last week, painter Rosie Ranauro got out of the hospital after a 13-day stay. She’s been there before.
“I’ve been sick since I was a little kid,” she said over Zoom from her Jamaica Plain studio. She suffered a ruptured appendix, persistent strep, and tonsillitis as a child, and as an adult, chronic pain, fatigue, and fibromyalgia. In 2015, she was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease that causes inflammation of her optic nerve. This time, it attacked her left eye. Steroids bring the swelling down, and her sight slowly returns.
“This was the most severe vision loss I’ve experienced,” she said. “I couldn’t reliably count fingers on a hand stretched in front of me.”
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It was bad timing. Ranauro, 32, had opened a solo show in February at LaMontagne Gallery. A second one was scheduled to open in early March at Brookline Arts Center. Curator Camilø Álvarez postponed that opening a week.
But the timing had a perverse poetry about it. Ranauro’s art revolves around her experience of her body, and this is an inflection moment for her art and her body.
Painted in radiant washes on unstretched canvas, her paintings depict ghostly figures that sometimes merge. “Proprioception,” at LaMontagne, features a ring of figures — sitting, flying, and reclining. In the warm, undefined space of the painting, veils of blue and purple waft around a golden center.
“It’s my inner psychic space. That space, when you’re falling from awake to dreaming, you’re able to fall safely there,” she said. “That space you go home to.”
As someone with chronic health issues, seeing her body as home has been challenging for Ranauro.
She made art as a child and attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and her art has always been about her body. But she called it “very brain-focused.” Perfectionistic, perhaps, and analytical, but not deeply felt.
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“I severed my relationship to my physical body in such a profound way,” she said.
By 2018, she had stopped painting completely. Then she took a continuing education ceramics class at MassArt and made, she said, “lumpy, terrible mugs.” Digging her fingers into wet clay was a revelation.
“Oh my God, art is just supposed to be fun,” she said. “I literally finished that semester and I came home and I just never stopped painting.”
She finds it fun, even joyful, to make performance art with her paintings. On Instagram (www.instagram.com/redladybluelady), Ranauro shares videos of her unorthodox process. She drapes her paintings around herself. She crumples them. She drags them on the floor.
“For the whole hour until we started this Zoom call,” she said, pulling a painting off her studio wall and wrapping herself in it, “I was under this painting in a ball.”
Alvarez said that Ranauro’s physicality with her paintings is what grabbed him.
“For me, anybody can mix abstraction with figuration, but with Rosie, it’s also performance, and it also borders on fashion. On top of that, movement. It’s sculptural, even, when she’s wearing it,” he said.
“People get really precious about a painting,” Ranauro said. “But it’s like the body. We don’t want anything to happen to the body. You don’t want to admit that just by existing, it’s going to decay. And there’s going to be loss.”
That somatic connection to her paintings is crucial to her mental and spiritual health. “Every single piece I’m working on is about grounding myself physically in the experience of painting so that it’s bringing me back to my body,” she said.
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Emotions reside in the body that we can’t think our way out of. Painting, movement, and making terrible mugs can help. After a pandemic, Ranauro sees a great need for that kind of help around the bend.
“This is a moment for us culturally around illness. We’re really going to have to grapple with a lot of grief,” she said. “I want to be here for that.”
While she was in the hospital, she closed her bad eye and painted self-portraits each day. Several of them are in the Brookline show.
“In the hospital, you don’t have control over when you’re waking up, when you’re sleeping, what’s happening to your body,” she said. “Just being able to draw my face over and over again was really healing.”
Treatments for Ranauro’s disease are rapidly evolving, and the prognosis for her sight is good. Still, losing vision in one eye for weeks at a time has made her wonder “what if?” That’s where “Grow More Eyes,” the title of the LaMontagne show, came from.
“What would happen if I couldn’t use my eyes? I have the whole rest of my body,” she said. “I’m just going to find a different way to see.”
GROW MORE EYES: NEW PAINTINGS BY ROSIE RANAURO
At LaMontagne Gallery, 460 Harrison Ave., through March 20. 617-487-3512, www.lamontagnegallery.com
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BODYMONOPOLIZINGPOLITICKING: ROSIE RANAURO
At Brookline Arts Center, 86 Monmouth St., Brookline, through March 26. 617-566-5715, www.brooklineartscenter.com
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Instagram @cate.mcquaid.