Luis Romero: Borderline

Luis Romero (Caracas, 1967), a multifaceted artist and acute observer of his immediate surroundings, began exhibiting  in the 1990’s and since then has developed a significant career, based on trans-disciplinary proposals and the exploration of the different forms and languages of visual representation that
coexist in the exercise of his artistic practice.

As a result of relational and dialogic thinking, his work undertakes a constant review of many of the principles of perception, as well as the conceptualization of contextual realities. In his early pieces the artistic discourse is built upon a strict and constant compilation and recycling of images and objects, texts, and founded typographies, which—through the use of mixed media and diverse formats, like painting, drawing, assembly, and collage—-create a universe of iconographic relations that have their origins in both domestic and urban surroundings, in much the same way as a biographic logic.

The fragmented narrative that is created between word, image, and space transcends personal experience and propels itself – with the new millennium – towards an eventual abstraction of forms. A renewed interest in the tradition of non-representational art drives him into a systematic investigation of a geometry engaged with the politics of representation, with the capacity to mean diverse realities, and the ability to express meaning. The construction of abstract ideas in the recent proposal by Romero, is born of the imagination and conscious comprehension, though not infallible, of the world.

In terms of contemporaneity, artists sharing a common sensitivity towards rethinking the modern legacy, resume and subvert the original sense of abstraction and – with a gesture that is not without irony and inquisition – redefine its poetics in accordance with various, unprecedented, potential scenarios. The very concept of non-representation is critically reevaluated as a negotiation incorporating [among other elements] aspects of historical and individual identity, the social and public space, and communicative language, in an effort to match daily experience with the intertextuality of one’s own introspective signs.

The investigation of Romero—far from focusing of the fracturing of modern postulates, the nostalgia for the avant-garde, and the self-referential notion of art distanced from reality—moves towards a proposal full of meaning, that is born of a contingent reality, his own. The Cartesian paradigm, based on a rational and explicit argument, has given way to a practice that is not intended to confront the binary forms of representation (figurative or abstract); on the contrary, it builds a distinctive notion, circumscribed in a creative maneuver, that expands the scope of visual perception and the limits of subjectivity. Heir to strong formal traditions, he controls rigorous geometry and the reluctant logic of minimalism, along with the conceptualization of ideas, in Works that manifest, through effective strategies of production and aesthetic awareness, an evasive interpretation of their contents. Herein lays the arguments that give meaning to his approach.

Bordeline, the first solo exhibition of Luis Romero at the Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, brings together his most recent body work that centers on the representation of two different topics -one structural and other emotional- from which the curatorial proposal is built. In colloquial terms, the word that gives the name to the exhibition could very well reveal resonances of the ideas of crisis, conflict, or imbalance. At the same time, the words “Border” and “Line” pass through semantic memory in an exercise to contextualize the formal relationships contingent on the ideas of “perimeter” and “frontier”, polarization and dichotomy; instability and vacuum. The installation consists of a vast repertoire of works developed in individualized series, consolidating a hybrid visual of broad scale, wherein the representation of an affective geometry is expressed either by using traditional materials or graphic techniques and technologies from industry.