Luis Emilio Romero’s Guatemalan Textile Paintings are a Fresh Take on Latin American Abstraction

Upon first glance one might view Luis Emilio Romero’s paintings as a translation of traditional textile patterns from the artist’s homeland of Guatemala, but upon further inspection, these pieces go far beyond this initial inspiration. The canvas itself is a plane organizing striations of pigments and their optical relationship with light: a topic of obsessive fascination for the artist. These dense fields of linear tones play with the viewer’s eye tracing pathways through the maze of rhythmic patterns, and just as one feels they have decoded the formula of repeating elements, particular anomalies begin to surface.

Guatemalan woven textiles carry stories within them as well as motifs legible to those fluent in that culture’s context. A familiar example in Euro-American cultures would be tartans from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales where the patterns are signifiers of one’s familial ties to a particular clan, often the source of the wearer’s last name. Although the artist is adamant that he does not replicate or even research particular textile traditions when approaching the start of a painting. Viewers may want to read the incredibly thin strokes of paint applied to the surface of these works as direct corollaries to the delicate thin width of a thread, since both objects are accumulated forms, built up one at a time over many hours. Museum collections of earlier generations of indigenous Guatemalan weaving techniques share this similar emphasis on linear directions in the visual repertoire of woven tunics, skirts, and mantles. Even stylized or abstract decorative elements are organized into frieze-like bands spanning the fabric’s full width either horizontally or vertically. Within this series of paintings, Romero maintains this connection by describing the compositions of each preparatory drawing as a “structural body of lines”. The artist was raised with knowledge of the craft practices of pottery, ceramics, and weaving, where a deep respect was placed on these organic materials’ relationship to the earth and their significance in Guatemalan cosmologies. These spiritual underpinnings to the process of creation remain of utmost significance to Romero’s practice.

Romero’s practice is equally situated in a discussion of the history of abstract painting, and deeply investigates the structures of organizing space through the optics of opacity, saturation, reflection, texture, and tone. With an expert understanding (and intuition) about color, Romero relies less on the didactics of theory, but more upon the energetic harmonies of tone that arise through intuitive experimentation. Breaking out the multitude of opportunities a single color can present, oils, thinners and medium are added in precisely noted proportions to map out its many guises. It’s uncanny how Romero physically senses and tactilely understands the resonant fields of light held within each variation of tone within pigments. Aptly titled Fortress of Light / Fortaleza de Luz, Romero’s inaugural solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles reflects this characteristic of the artist’s practice.

Akin to a mathematician, within Romero’s mind’s eye structural units of intricate linear forms emerge, are recorded through weeks of individual drawings, and are framed out into diverse connective systems through a cognitive meditation requiring complete silence. Monk-like in the artist’s consistent cultivation of harnessing the originating singularity of creation’s energetic frequency, Romero’s linear forms “rise, and levitate like a cosmic visual experience” requiring adept sensitivity to capture. It is important to keep in mind that the artist is not synesthetic and that adding color comes last within his process. Strictly utilizing pencil on carefully selected paper, the structural components of “these lines hover, they have an aura vibration, and they echo one another as they repeat” within the artist’s gnostic bodily experience of mark making.

Cleverly hung in the space, the brightest palette of blues in Interna Joya / Internal Jewel (2024) and oranges in Ritmo Armónico / Harmonic Rhythm (2022) each directionally anchor the space facing one another from the far sides of the gallery. While the remaining majority of works flow from a heavier space–dissecting a darker tenor of tones–coinciding with a chapter of uncertainty (and perhaps even instability) in charting a course to remain a full-time artist after completing an MFA. Many of the exhibition’s works were completed or at least begun last year during a winter residency at Mostajo Projects in Warren, CT, therefore reflecting the natural landscape of hibernating barren trees and colder tones of the season’s shorter days. While initially severe, upon continuous looking and deep reflection of these works a subtle myriad array of forest greens, burgundies, aubergines, navies, and burnt umbers are revealed. This body of work should not be written off as mere decorative imitation of indigenous weaving traditions, as they have complex underpinnings within color theory, energetic harmonics, engineering of linear units, and spiritual force of ancestral cosmologies channeled into acutely articulated modernist-tinged abstractions.

The artist is gaining traction with inclusion in group shows in New York since graduating, receiving the Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship last year, as well as making his art fair debut at NADA this May. As Latin American contemporary art gains traction in museums across the United States and with important gallery support it will be interesting to see where Romero ends up next as his practice develops in depth and breadth.

Luis Emilio Romero: Fortress of Light / Fortaleza de Luz is on view through August 17, 2024 at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, 1110 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021.

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