Domenico Romeo: ANM_PEX_002_BER_22

NADAN presents Italian artist Domenico Romeo with his first solo exhibition in Germany. In this exhibition, the artist brought his latest installation series. These huge steel-framed shaped works are inspired by urban street scenes and language. The artist combines both mediums, focusing on symbols, rhythms, and grids to develop his unique visual alphabet through years of research and experimentation.

Monochromatic colours, simple structures, and cold metallic materials, Romeo’s artworks do not look exciting at first glance but are nonetheless rational and intensely contemporary. They are indeed avant-garde and courageous, with a great deal of serious thought about their surroundings and their artistic expression, broken down and reassembled to form a visual equation of vertical and horizontal lines. He investigates the transformation of our imaginary reality into structures that can be controlled by reason, in order to subsequently rediscover these same structures in a certain natural reality, inspiring the viewer to insight and re-examine the surrounding by virtue of a stylized vision.

The form of Romeo’s work is abstract in the extreme but contains a great deal of linguistic information – industrial development, urbanisation, norms and individuality. A high degree of equilibrium can also be seen in Romeo’s work, in which the rectangular hard steel assemblage seeks a balance at the level of industrial society between individuality and collective balance, nature and spirit, matter and consciousness.

ANM_20_1/1_TR_22 The tight vertical line structure is connected by horizontal steel bars like a strong wall divided the space. Same length, uniform thickness. The lines are closely connected to form a rational story chapter. The seemingly random fabric on the other side brings an element of instability to the definite structure, softening the hardness and coldness of the steel and creating a rhythmic breathing air. The fabric, on the other hand, is hard and has a gleaming black sheen. His ANM_21_3/3_CL_22 und ANM_23_4/4_CL_22 reflect the same inventive approach. It has a strong personality that is understated, self-conscious, and craves for attention.

ANM_22_1/1_TR_22, located in the back of the exhibition space, is a tower in the process of being built, with each level of square metal blocks replicating the next. The replicated structure forms the basis for a robust building and the possibility of development. These substances influence the way we live in urban society, as Karl Marx writes in his Basis und Überbau: The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. In the midst of the rapid rise of cities, there is perhaps a greater need for a philosophical, cultural, political and self-conscious ascent beyond the material. The artist aims to provoke the viewer to reflect on the deep structure of society and its interactions.

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