Rossana

‘Home is just an idea in my head’

2022

Rossana Romero 

‘Home is just an idea in my head’ is a continuation of Rossana Romero’s first solo show, ‘No Des Papaya,’ which debuted in 2020.  Her work is connected through recurring symbols, landscapes, and bodies of water. These symbols act as a throughline weaving between  pieces, telling a story you can both predict and reference. This series focuses less on her culture and politics, bringing more attention to where she goes to escape them by creating the home she’s always longed for in her work. As a child, she came from Colombia to the United States in the height of a war. These circumstances led others to make decisions for her that left her memory unclear; unable to differentiate between imagination and reality.

Her interest in interpreting these ‘imagined’ memories came from her love of reading Latin American literature, specifically Gabriel Marquez Garcia as well as from the painting ‘The Dream’ by Henri Rousseau.  She references both artists in this body of work consistently. 

Rossana’s technique changes throughout the series, experimenting with different textures in her oil paints and oil sticks, using bright colors to make the work approachable, and introducing new mediums like paper mache. 

In this series, you look into nightmares, dreams, and memories that intertwine with each other, becoming difficult to tell apart. Rossana takes you on a journey into an underworld that acts as an escape for when reality isn’t manageable. Beyond just a creative process, this series is a result of the artist’s spiritual practice, introducing you to her underworld and the offerings she presents to her guides and ancestors. She brings them along using symbols like the double headed reptiles, double felines, double shadows, butterflies, parrots and more. Her creative process also acts as therapy, revisiting memories that became blurry and recreating a home from what she remembers. Even though each piece is completely different from the other you will find similarities, consistent symbols and references that affirm her place in this home she created. By creating these pieces she allows the audience to join her in her safe places, like the water or mountains, inviting you to feel the texture of a bumpy reptile or the gaze of the two eyes that guide her. 

 Her work contains an eeriness that draws you into bodies of water or a deep dark forest. She includes small details that make you want to closely observe every inch in the hopes that you don't miss a part of the story she’s telling.  While some have called her work surrealism due to its impossible nature,  this work is real to her as she brings an imagined home from inside her head onto canvas.