Artists: Ricardo Romero

Original Artworks from the Artist Ricardo Romero

These works are included in the Territory exhibition at Armazem Das Artes Alcobaca

The exhibition text for the artist is included below: 

RICARDO ROMERO

RICARDO ROMERO b. 1981, Evora, Portugal
Portugal

RECONSIDERATION

Ricardo Romero works across photography, painting, sculpture, installation and public space, shifting between mediums according to what an idea requires. Rather than being defined by a single visual language, his work is connected by a recurring strategy: taking something recognizable and changing the conditions in which we encounter it.

A photograph can leave the private scale of an album and occupy the side of a building. A domestic animal can grow to monumental proportions and enter a public square. Through changes in scale, material and context, Ricardo moves images and objects between private and public, intimate and monumental, familiar and unexpected.

Photography plays an important role in this process. Images of people, particularly children and figures from another time, become part of a shared landscape when enlarged across architecture. Ricardo has also developed Romerography, a distinctive approach to architectural-scale screen printing. Monumental images are divided into fragments, each requiring its own screen, allowing a process traditionally associated with paper to expand across entire walls.

His sculptures approach the same questions from another direction. Familiar animals and human figures, often rendered entirely in white, black or red, are enlarged or placed into unexpected relationships with their surroundings. A cat emerges through the windows and roofline of a building. A dog crosses a historic square. These encounters can be playful, strange or disorienting, but the subjects remain recognizable.

This Territory is RECONSIDERATION.

Recognition is often the beginning of Ricardo's work rather than its conclusion. By changing scale, context and even the processes of making, he disrupts our usual relationship with familiar images and objects. The ordinary becomes monumental, the intimate becomes collective, and something we might otherwise pass without notice demands another look.