Hans Theys

 

 

 

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Hans Theys

 

 

The Rainbow Code

Some words on paintings by Dominique Romeyer

 

 

Dominique Romeyer’s paintings are made up of planes, bands and lines of different colours and textures forming multicoloured compositions that playfully bring to mind geometric art without being geometric. They are first and foremost the work of a painter, where each painting is continually constructed and deconstructed without a prior goal. “They focus on becoming,” the artist told me. In terms of colours, the superimposition of thin layers of diluted acrylic paint gives rise to ‘colours which do not exist’, as the painter Johan De Wilde formulated it in a letter to me. ‘Colours without a name’, which cannot be set as a goal by thought and can only spring from a series of actions. 

            In an earlier version of this essay, I used the word ‘patchwork’ to describe Romeyer’s paintings, but she let me know that ‘the punk in her’ resents this word, probably because it reminds her of industrious housewives. To me, the term implies that she creates new, comical, apparently sloppy ‘grids’, in opposition to the apparent straightness of geometrical art. Firstly, I might add that Mondriaan’s, Joseph Albers’s and Agnes Martin’s paintings are very crafty and not straight at all, if you look at them from close by. Secondly, I would like to stress that the apparent sloppiness of Romeyer’s ‘grids’ allows for very subtle colour changes, for instance when two meeting planes create a very thin line between them, as the result of an emerging third colour. (Actually, Romeyer’s technique functions as a machine to produce unpredictable colours.) Finally, the term ‘patchwork’ reminds me of the Los Angeles ‘tradition’ of collage and assemblage. “My work stems from what my mother called ‘packratting,’” Sterling Ruby told me. “She insisted on not throwing anything away and reusing as much as possible. The key to everything I have made is collage: the possibility of combining soft and hard or round and straight stuff.” The Los Angeles-based Chicano artist Vincent Ramos told me about a similar approach in the Mexican-American culture, coined ‘rasquachismo’ by the scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, who describes it as a specific aesthetic sensibility based on the capacity to “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” or “making do with what you have”, for instance when decorating a garden with pieces of mirror and crockery, tricking out a car, preparing a feast meal with tidbits or creating the backdrop of a theatre play with stitched together produce sacks. Unavoidably, rasquachismo is related to personal pride, cultural identity and political resistance. Any new art form, such as Romeyer’s paintings, deviates from the norm. As such, it is experienced as comical, liberating, poetic and political.

            Romeyer’s work is organic, succulent and elegant. It breathes and inspires. It sprouts from a hard and demanding discipline, but gives shape to the dream of freedom. It is new and personal, tender and decisive, recalcitrant and generous.

 

Montagne de Miel, 2 August 2024