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May Issue 2004
The Wells Gallery in Charleston, SC, Features Exhibitions by Alex Zapata and Susan Romaine
The Wells Gallery in Charleston, SC, is proud
to announce a two person show featuring Alex Zapata from Bolivia
and Charleston painter Susan Romaine. Their contemporary realism
is a not to be missed addition to the Charleston art scene. The
exhibit opens on May 6 and continues through May 21, 2004. The
two artists will bring together work that is compelling and energetic.
Their classical techniques and unique style create feeling and
layers that must be peeled away for the viewers to create their
own story.
Romaine began her career as an artist in 1999 and has enjoyed
great success since then. She currently has work included in
an exhibit at the Gibbes Museum of Art as well as the museum's
Artist-in-Residence. Her new exhibit, Urban Still, captures
the simplicities of the daily grind, including restaurants, traffic,
and office buildings; the objects in our life that we seem too
busy to take notice of in our daily grind.
"I have always wondered why humans feel compelled to emulate
the universal process of creating matter from what seems to be
nothing to engage in the act of creation," says Romaine.
"My own creative acts, whether objects or words or works
of art, seem to come from a need to feel grounded, to attain a
sense, however contrived it may be, of permanence and place."
Romaine seems to capture the urban environment without the people
who created it, bringing a timeless quality to her work. She explains,
"The products of this compulsion to create are all around
us, nowhere more than in urban environments. They seem busy and
crowded and yet, when I pause, I see that it is we humans who
make our cities busy, moving energetically at a much faster rate,
existing at a higher level of vibration than the things surrounding
us."
Romaine's work is dominated by her strong source of light and
architectural shapes. "Once I have manifested my mark, I
can move around it, examine it, barter it, but I am never again
one with it. I am separate. My moment of unity with it is brief.
And so I create again and yet again to experience that sense of
oneness only to find that in the process of doing so I am already
speeding away," says the artist.
Romaine's work combined with the intense and at times surreal work of Alex Zapata's will be an interesting dynamic that will captivate and appeal to all audiences. When visiting the gallery Zapata's paintings cannot be overlooked. The gallery is pleased to exhibit a new body of his work for the third consecutive year. This year joined with Romaine's Urban Still Zapata's Portals will most certainly surpass his previous shows. Zapata explains, "I've always felt 'trapped by definition'. I have a real passion for the human figure and the infinite number of expressions and moods which I can try to capture in a face or figure, but that is merely the starting point. From there I enjoy the freedom of traveling throughout art history, as I know it, in my quest to express that certain 'ness' any one painting might have."
Zapata takes an ordinary experience and by
combining his highly classical techniques with his incredible
imagination he turns the ordinary into the beautifully unusual.
For more info check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, contact
the gallery at 843/853-3233 or at (www.wellsgallery.com).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2004 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2004 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.