Librado Romero

In recent years, Librado Romero set off on several journeys by train he had been thinking about for most of his life. Heading south and then west from his home in New York, with dozens of empty sketchbooks, he went to rediscover America, to provoke old memories and to stimulate the motors of his imagination. He had always clung to a small childish belief that if you could look out at the landscape moving past you, really look at it, you could make the territory your own. By putting it into his head and into his drawings he could stake claim to all of it - not only the lakes and trees and mountains but to the slagheaps, rusty structures and shanties. The whole country from coast to coast and from both sides of the tracks. More than that, he could also pin down and take possession of seemingly forgotten memories and old emotions that went back almost 50 years to a time his father had headed a train crew in the southwest, when, as he remembered, the old man would dash off on stormy nights to help lift derailed boxcars and get things moving again.

Like clouds and tides, trains are universal metaphors, but for Romero they have always had particular, intimate, even mystical associations. As he made his way down the Atlantic seaboard and across the Gulf Coast and moved on across mountains and deserts, the artist covered ground, new and familiar, filling his sketchbooks with captured images and filing away the emotional connections, colors, mysterious shapes and shadows, seized from the receding land as he moved westward in space and both forward and backward in time. Eventually, he got to the starting point, Calexico, the town where as a boy he had joyfully discovered the world and it's shifting horizon. Like all real journeys of discovery, he had come full circle. Ever since then, he has been refining the ore he mined, creating paintings. They have grown out of his sketches, but they
have also been nourished and augmented by the flickers of vision, the glimmers of imagination, the snatches of dream, and the fragments of memory.  

"I paint without thinking in advance about a particular meaning, some of the forms or colors come accidentally. It's like a trace but, afterwards, I select the accidents that I consider significant and I discard the others. It is very difficult to give them tiles. Like a diary, for me, they witness a particulat moment, a particular feeling". (fragment of an interview with Librado Romero, by Paul Doru Mugur)

Ceremony 1999, Mixed media on canvas
52"x48"