“Walker Roman’s paintings evince a dreamlike quality, yet remain based in reality”
—Miles McEnery
Walker T. Roman is a multidisciplinary painter leveraging parallel practices of observational figuration and process based abstraction. Using transparent and photo-dynamic materials his studio interweaves material immediacy with the phenomenological experience of nature.
Graduating with his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2012 he spent the next 8 years working primarily in a landscape tradition honing formal and observational skills that would inform his return to abstraction in 2020. Growing up on the island of Martha’s Vineyard as the son of a technical polymath and a literature devotee, he developed a primal connection to the landscape and a deep curiosity for technical practice and craft.
His work explores the observed reality of time, light, and space seeking to bypass the linguistic abstraction we impose on experience in order to foster intimacy with the natural world and our own bodies.
Artist’s Statement
Freedom From Certainty: A solo exhibition at The Workshop Gallery
This work came from a want to experience my own perception, not to just look at something with my eyes, but to be made aware of their seeing. I began producing abstract works to free my painting from the obligation of representation, and more directly access what interested me the most; the mechanics of sight.
My own experience seeing the minimalist works Paul Sharits’ solid color films of the 1960’s, James Turrell’s on going exploration of the visual nervous system, and Donald Judd’s 100 Untitled Works In Mill Aluminum greatly influenced this body of work as they make clear that sight can be both content and subject, eliminating the presence of anything recognizable.
By functioning as mirrors, albeit imperfect ones, the works prod at cliched sentiments of painting’s social function while being both the subject of our gaze and a deflection of it. Reflective surfaces create fixed objects that change in appearance dependent on environment and viewing angle. Visually the experience is elusive and slippery, as the works mutability allows our own perception to function as an additional medium, often to disorienting effect. Where does the painting end and its surroundings begin? By foregrounding this contextualizing relationship I hope to make more explicit the way in which we see.
While sharing the minimalist desire for reduction, the work stops short of completely erasing anything recognizable and instead alludes to familiar surfaces such as wet asphalt and polished concrete, suggesting that such purity of observation is not exclusive to Art, but can be accessed anywhere.