Romina Salem | ¿ Cómo suena un azul furioso sobre un plateado lunar?

Romina Salem’s paintings present a kind of expanded synesthesia. Some people report experiencing the strange ability to see shapes and colors from music, which is known as synesthesia. However, in this case the process is reversed and it is the visual impulses that generate a soundtrack in the mind of the viewer. This internal music that emanates from the wings can be thought of as a glossolalia of color that invades the senses of the unsuspecting.

In the world of the selfie, of folders flooded with jpgs, of an exponential invasion of screens, these paintings seem to be images of a different order. Detritus of exterior panoramic views, portraits of transfigured nature and even a certain dissonant gardening of a metaphysical quality that escapes the visual, expanding towards other senses. That is why it is not strange that these intense blocks of dreamlike landscaping demand a sonorous life that goes beyond the canvas.

There where the tacit borders between the map and the territory are blurred, where the figurative is no longer a mere representation but a distortion and coupling of its own meaning, at that point, chromaticism is not enough to be only visual. And if the coexistence of bright – jungle – colors with a numismatic silver can be related to polytonality; This, more than the contemplation of a Debussy or a Ravel, would refer to the frenetic cadences of the Free Jazz of Coltrane, Coleman, Ayler or Sun Ra. The stridency as a palette.

At this point, Chromatic fully embodies its double meaning: visual and sound. Hear colors, see sounds. Every painting generates some form of music, but in Romina Salem’s paintings it is not just a vague association, but a living entity that is there playing, waiting for whoever can hear colors, without amplifiers or speakers.

Alan Courtis