«Carol Rama has that sort of reckless spirit that first appeared ten years ago when she exhibited her dense larvae of figures dripping with the encrusted, resinous secretions reminiscent of stills in the small Galleria del Bosco, opposite Palazzo Campana. As an artist, she is avid for research and experience, fleeting affections, irregular propositions: exactly as anyone should be, today, who moves as she and many others do torn by the desire for a place to finally pause in and the already foregone reluctance to accept it definitively - as though accepting a death sentence.»
from: Luigi Carluccio, «Un rischio di morte», in La Gazzetta del Popolo, 9 January 1957
 

«Whoever knows Carol, whoever knows her everyday way of speaking, knows that there is a recurring phrase that she is particularly fond of: “It’s lived”. It is an expression that can be applied to any object that shows the passing of time, that admits to having been used. It is an expression that affectionately comes to hand in consolation for irreparable damage to a plate, for a mark that cannot be removed from a piece of furniture or an item of clothing. But it is not just a comforting utterance. Above all it sums up Carol’s profound horror for everything that has not had - or does not even hint at having had - a past, a story. It says that the past is necessarily wear and tear and corrosion, taken to the point where use becomes its opposite. So, on the contrary, every object comes to life with its irritating gift of original innocence, which must rapidly be eradicated. The marks of use must cut into it - and spoil and disfigure it, if necessary - so that the contaminating, but finally vital, evidence of having lived emerges as soon as possible.»
from: Edoardo Sanguineti, in Carolrama, Galleria La Bussola, Turin, 1971
 

«But who, in actual fact, is Olga Carol Rama?
She is a diabolic angel, affable yet wild; she is a perfect amateur; she is survivor from a wreck who has never surrendered to banality; she is one of Manganelli’s imps and an incendiary goblin; she is artifice, a perfect mise-en-scène; she is a mosaic of ruins, of leftovers corroded by time; she is a literary construction, she is a poem by Sanguineti and a piece by Baudelaire; she is exotic, erotic, heroic.But she is also ‘beautiful and damned’, truculent and seraphic, primitive and blasé, vanquished yet invulnerable, vigorous yet asthenic, sparky and roguish, aristocratic and plebeian, depraved yet quite innocent, cheerful yet desolate, an educated gentlewoman, self-effacing and hard-working, poor and monastic. Is she Molly Bloom or Alice, Mrs Ramsey or Pandora, Sisyphus or Icarus, Gorgon or Cagliostro, Medusa or Eurydice without Orpheus?
No one, no one can know. The artist gives and withholds, charged with permanent mystery.»
from: Lea Vergine, «Carol Rama: eroica, esotica, eretica», in Carol Rama, Milan, 1985
 

«So, among bulls, octopuses, frogs, toads, skeletons, bodies, limbs, capitals, crowns, genitalia, eyes, velvets, blobs of colour, buildings.... Carol Rama’s art builds up to unite things, establish contacts, draw life with clarity, the living senses, tenderness, openness, eternal yes.»
from: Dario Trento, «Carol Rama», in Westuff, September-October 1986
 

«n the end, all Carol’s efforts must have been, from the beginning, directed towards trying to force into shape something that risked being condemned, with a particularly intense force, to shapelessness.»
from: Enrico Filippini, «I denti di Mila», La Repubblica, 14 May 1987