Mateo Romero
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Top: Pray for Rain, 1 of 2 , 7’x5’, charcoal and acrylic on panel, 2008, Courtesy of the Artist; bottom left: Butterfly, 40”x60”, mixed media on panel, 2007, Courtesy of the Artist; bottom right: Deer Dancer Series, 6’x8’, mixed media on panel, 2006, Courtesy of the Artist |
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Contemporary Cochiti Painter Mateo Romero explains that he has always felt driven to make art -at an early age by his innovative and artistic family (including his potter grandmother Teresita Chavez Romero, painter father Santiago Romero, and artist brother Diego Romero), later by his need for self-expression, and finally as a lifelong vocation and commitment to inspiring thought. Romero studied at the San Francisco Academy of Art and in 1989 earned a B.F.A. at Dartmouth College. He continued his fine arts training at the Institute of American Indian Arts before completing his M.F.A. in printmaking at the University of New Mexico in 1995.
Throughout his body of work, Romero provides snapshots of Native life – from the ancient to the contemporary, the mundane to the ceremonial, and the beautiful to the unpleasant. He observes and documents moments in time, creating social landscapes where figurative elements blend with abstract symbols. Some of his paintings derive from his sense of responsibility to create artwork that raises questions about contemporary social issues affecting Indian communities. In these pieces he confronts historical violence or religious intolerance. His work, such as his Indian gaming paintings, can be controversial, and like the pop art references in Andy Warhol’s paintings, Romero points out self-imposed addictions and double standards.
Other paintings offer counterpoints to these darker moments. These pieces investigate his tribe’s sense of community and connection to the past, or portray Puebloan ceremony and dance. Romero’s latest paintings incorporate photographic imagery that he recontextualizes, creating an historical dialogue and visual narrative of his people. Some subject matter includes Pueblo dancers and traditional figures, such as the Deer Dancer who seeks to reaffirm balance and regenerate life and is a vital aspect of the Puebloan world by representing continuance, resistance, and renewal. Since much of Pueblo ceremonial life is restricted to outsiders, Romero turned to abstraction as a means to express himself and depict his culture without violating tribal protocol. He practices a form of “withholding” by sharing information that is permissible while protecting culturally-prohibited knowledge.
Romero sees the act of “mark making” to be as old as time itself and associated with prehistoric drawings on ancestral canyon walls such as those at Bandelier National Monument. His images are large scale, powerful, and imposing. They feature swirling, thick gestural marks that relay movement and emotion. Some of his work is influenced by 1960s Abstract-Expressionist painting, such as Franz Kline’s calculated spontaneity and attention to brush strokes, William de Kooning’s paint drips and figure ground ambiguity, and Richard Diebenkorn’s figurative work. Romero’s work also references Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages and complex painting surfaces. Romero’s paint-handling is clearly labored and textural – with layers that are sometimes splattered, scraped, and applied with palette knife and brush. He combines archaic elements of Pueblo culture with formal qualities of easel painting, and the result is rhythmic, hypnotic, and trancelike, reflecting the metaphysical space of the Pueblo and the dances.