Greetings From Uruguay

2015 - Painting (Painting)

60.96 x 59.69 cm

Julia Rommel

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On the artwork, Rommel states: “I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Purity, where they take a lot of walks through the jungle in Uruguay, or Paraguay, I can’t remember. One of the characters takes a walk and jumps off a cliff; it’s kind of dark. The painting reminded me of a long, dark, and very serious walks in beautiful places.” With references to Howard Hodgkin in the incorporation of the stretcher into the painting and certain kinds of mark making, to Matisse’s cut outs and to the history of Cubist collage, Rommel has created a dreamy oeuvre that manifests her strong conceptual interest in process and unmapped journeys. In the making of Greetings From Uruguay , the artist paints on a stretched canvas, un-stretches it, repaints, re-stretch, sands it, repaints it, wipes it, cuts it, staples it, un-stretches it and so on until she reaches a definitive work. The painting resembles collages of shreds of canvases with the stretcher incorporated into the painting to provide relief.

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Julia Rommel (b. 1980, Salisbury, Maryland) is an American painter with a strong interest in the art historical canon. Keenly aware of the precedents set by Abstract Expressionists as well as European Masters such as Matisse, her paintings are manifestations of a process of construction and deconstruction that eventuates in an abstract work that not only has a sense of the history of its own making but is also loosely associative in its reference to landscape. In her paintings, Rommel is less interested in signature brush strokes than in what she describes as using tools “to keep my signature away”. Her paintings act equally as research into color. While they are not attempts at color harmonies, the artist is interested in the conflict between colors and of using tones to eliminate one another. Rommel’s work acts between painting and relief, insisting on the objectiveness of the work.

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Colors:

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• procedure.n.01
• labor.n.02
• painting.n.01
• collage.n.01
• surface.n.01
• materiality.n.02