Mel Ramos is best known for his paintings of superheroes and female nudes juxtaposed with pop culture imagery. Many of the subjects in his paintings emerge from iconic brands or cultural touchstones like Chiquita bananas, M&M bags, or Snickers. In these works, visual delight is combined with suggested edible and commercial indulgence.

Like his contemporaries, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Ramos appropriates imagery from mass media and pop culture to produce ironic distillations of advertisement. Ramos and his fellow Pop artists provided a visual language for audiences to understand and experience the proliferation of commercial images that exploded in post-war America, and for today’s viewers, a way to interpret the current abundance of images provided by a digital world. However, Ramos’s paintings showcase an appreciation and understanding of Old Masters in their combination with sensual female nudes and realism. In his later works, Ramos even began using computers to assist him in his creative process, using the technology to help him create compositions, from which he then painted.

These works conflate optical and savory fantasies, tempting the viewer to understand the connection between visual and gustatory consumption. Weaving through this is the understanding that there is no barrier, no hierarchy of subject matter that normally exists within art. As Ramos noted, “Comic books, girlie magazines, magazine ads, billboards are all art to me. The whole point of my art is that art grows out of an art.” The paintings sit at the intersection of humor, satire, wit, sensuality, and earnestness.