22nd – 30th January, 2013 Kenny Schachter/ROVE Lincoln House 33-34 Hoxton Square
London N1 6NN
Painting and dyeing is the first solo exhibition of Romana Londi. The exhibition will showcase a series of large paintings on un-primed cotton sheets and one installation work. In this series the artist explores the concepts of duality, memory and the tension between impulse and control.
Inspired by the multilayered colour stains on ancient ruins and marks left on the walls of public spaces (such as fingerprints in schools and train stations) Londi’s choice of material is vital to these works as the unprimed cotton easily absorbs each brush stroke saturating and expanding it in dramatic impressions on both sides of the plane.
The artist wishes to challenge and escape the flat margins of the picture plane. By pressing on the expressive potential of process-oriented art through non-conventional actions she attempts to re-enact, rather than illustrate, a compromise between possibility and actuality. Her works are subject to a long process of painting, dyeing and bleaching which is operated repeatedly on both sides of the plane, creating a symbiotic relationship between the two sides. Here the syntax of colour and the eruptions of perspective lines cyclically appear and disappear converging organically into irreverent abstract forms.
Through these abstract paintings the artist wants to express a moment of collision and interaction. As in the case of the series ‘Not dead but sleeping’ the painting ‘Yugen’ (who’s title references the Japanese theory of the sublime, literally meaning ‘an awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and mysterious for words’) evokes sceneries of natural phenomena that attempt to awaken in the viewer a turmoil of bewildering emotions.
The installation work, part of the ‘Unpainted painting’ series consists of four panels of Romana Londi’s art studio walls. In the variation of colors noisily splashing the walls Romana Londi converts the breakdown of all the paintings made in her art studio, allowing the viewer to track an honest chart of her movements while executing her paintings.
Romana Londi’s works are conceived as cumulative palimpsest, a multilayered record of the almost mercurial consequences of her actions on the material and an archive of her aesthetic intuitions and numerous attempts towards a harmonious pandemonium of past and present realities.
Romana Londi is a London based Italian/Irish artist. She studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and graduated in Fine Art and Theory of Art from University of East London in 2009. Romana Londi has worked as a fine artist since 2005 and her work is part of numerous private art collections in Italy, France, US and UK.
