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PRESS
RELEASE
MARCH 23 - APRIL 30, 2001
LIBRADO
ROMERO
VIEW FROM THE CORRIDOR
OPENING
RECEPTION:
FRIDAY | MARCH
23, 2001 | 6 -
9 PM
GALLERY@49 is pleased to announce the opening
of Librado Romero's second solo exhibition at
the gallery on March 23, 2001. Entitled "View
from the Corridor", the show will present
a selection of recent drawings, paintings and
works on paper inspired by various rail trips
throughout the country.
In
recent years, Librado Romero set off on several
journeys by train he had been thinking about
for most of his life. Heading south and then
west from his home in New York, with dozens
of empty sketchbooks, he went to rediscover
America, to provoke old memories and to stimulate
the motors of his imagination. He had always
clung to a small childish belief that if you
could look out at the landscape moving past
you, really look at it, you could make the territory
your own. By putting it into his head and into
his drawings he could stake claim to all of
it -- not only the lakes and trees and mountains
but to the slagheaps, rusty structures and shanties.
The whole country from coast to coast and from
both sides of the tracks. More than that, he
could also pin down and take possession of seemingly
forgotten memories and old emotions that went
back almost 50 years
to a time his father had headed a train crew
in the southwest, when, as he remembered, the
old man would dash off on stormy nights to help
lift derailed boxcars and get things moving
again.
Like
clouds and tides, trains are universal metaphors,
but for Romero they have always had particular,
intimate, even mystical associations. As he
made his way down the Atlantic seaboard and
across the Gulf Coast and moved on across mountains
and deserts, the artist covered ground, new
and familiar, filling his sketchbooks with captured
images and filing away the emotional connections,
colors, mysterious shapes and shadows, seized
from the receding land as he moved westward
in space and both forward and backward in time.
Eventually, he got to the starting point, Calexico,
the town where as a boy he had joyfully discovered
the world and it's shifting horizon. Like all
real journeys of discovery, he had come full
circle. Ever since then, he has been refining
the ore he mined, creating paintings. They have
grown out of his sketches, but they
have also been nourished and augmented by the
flickers of vision, the glimmers of imagination,
the snatches of dream, and the fragments of
memory.
Librado
Romero's exhibition will be on view at Gallery@49
from March 23 through April 30, 2001. A reception
for the artist will be held Friday, March 23rd
from 6 to 9PM. Gallery@49, located at 322 West
49th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), can
be reached by subways E, C to 50th St. or N,
R to 49th St. Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12 noon
- 6PM and by appointment. For additional information
or visual material please
call (212) 767-0855.
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