Robert Hromec: New Mixed-Media Paintings on Aluminum Plate October 2013

This catalogue covers Slovak-born artist Robert Hromec’s mixed-media paintings on aluminum plate where abstract form provides the chance to explore art history in a new way. Robert Hromec’s mixed-media work comes out of his extensive engagement with traditional forms of lithography and intaglio, but its exciting qualities owe more to his work as a painter, specifically with color and graphic design. In its formal sophistication, innovative use of materials, and atmospheric vitality, the work questions traditional painting even as it adheres to tradition. During his eight-year stay in New York City (1990-1998), Hromec experimented with mixing various art techniques to achieve his unique art language, which he calls “print-painting.” Optical illusion plays an important role in his latest print-paintings, with aluminum plate used as the base

Hromec’s painted-on-metal clearly draw upon a variety of artistic influences. The artist combines primitive figuration- roughly drawn hands and feet- with biomorphic abstraction. Likewise, he balances his love of bold graphic design with a strongly gestural painterly element. The resultant works on aluminum are suggestive of a dream state: Through color, form, and technique. They evoke a moment in which layers of sensation, thought, and memory clash together in unexpected, sometimes upsetting, and sometimes quite beautiful ways. Hromec’s figurative imagery refers back to ancient, primal experiences of physical conflict and eroticism even as his various techniques evoke disparate moments in Western art history. Moving from cave painting to classical printmaking to European surrealism and American abstract expressionism, the works challenge even as they delight. Their synthesis is one of the ancient and the contemporary, the primal and the sophisticated, the figurative and the abstract.