Emerging from a constant conflict between abstraction and figuration, Romulo Avi’s paintings explore ideas surrounding ephemerality, memory, and image. Avi creates intense, colourful, abstract paintings by building up and removing layers of Gesso. To create densely layered, process-based paintings, he draws on his technical training in representational painting to bring images forth and push them away. Avi works with pure potentiality, an abstract idea which allows him to draw up intuitive anthropomorphic structures outside the frameworks of representation. They are an expanded investigation of his perspective on life, inspired by reality and being as an ever-changing, transmutative experience.
Using unconscious mark making, the surface of Avi’s works are loaded with a vibrational energy charged by opposing colours. His works are a reminder to acknowledge temporary moments and the fleeting nature of life.