Opening: Than PI: New Paintings by Mateo Romero
Cara Romero Gallery, located in the heart of downtown Santa Fe across from Vladem Contemporary, kicks off the Santa Fe Summer Season with Than Pi, a new exhibition of paintings by Mateo Romero, on Thursday, June 18, with an opening reception from 5–8 p.m.
The exhibition includes 12 new paintings, including five large-scale canvases. Romero’s heavily impastoed landscapes of Northern New Mexico and Pueblo scenes have earned him broad recognition over the course of his career.
“I am deeply honored to invite you to a special exhibition at Cara Romero Gallery + Studio, Says Cara, — a solo presentation of new large-scale paintings by Mateo Romero, one of the most significant and distinctive landscape painters working in the American Southwest today.”
The exhibition presents five monumental oil paintings—high-keyed, richly textured, and unmistakably his own—depicting landscapes sacred to the Puebloan people of New Mexico. Rooted in a deep painterly lineage as well as his life as an artist from Cochiti Pueblo, Romero’s technique renders light and land with a presence felt as much as it is seen. Than Pi is the Tewa word for sunrise.
“As Native people, we are born into this world with an expectation that we will be participatory in life and contribute to society,” says Romero. “What I have contributed most directly to life are my children and my art. Painting and drawing for me have always been urgent, compelling, and necessary. I make marks out of a need to communicate, to contextualize, to form meaning in the world around me.”
