BLINK is a series of micro-posts that will focus on individual artists. Honing in on select work or works, each post will be a fleeting snapshot of art activity from around the world, one that hopefully inspires and prompts deeper investigations.
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The works of Jose Romussi are a form of artistic intervention that combine a particular craft with a repurposed image. With a strong background in embroidery, Romussi creates works with thread that bear a distinct duality between old and new, production and hand-made. The process involves a base layer––a found or photographed two-dimensional image––overlaid with geometric forms, letters, or animals that appear out of the lines of colorful thread. For each work, Romussi chooses a discriminate color combination and creates shapes that add a stark contrast to the black and white photograph and stillness of the posed subject underneath.
Jose Romussi – „Untitled (DANCE Series)“ (2012), Embroidery on photo; Courtesy of the artist
The old photographs of dancers are an especially strong representation of this duality, as the creation of something new and personal over the old. Strings weave in and out creating distinctive forms out of a mere couple of lines, adding new life to fluffy skirts, tangles of bodily form, and playful bursts of color that shoot out of hands and ears. The dancers once frozen in their black and white images, in rigid poses, enter a new life of impulsive shapes, movement, and color. Though the process of sewing onto delicate photos is presumably intricate, the result has an effortless spontaneity, as though the thread simply appeared and was always meant for this context.
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Additional Information
Jose Romussi was born in Chile where he studied landscape design. Over the past few years he has gained a significant following for his screen prints and collages in which he combines vintage black and white photographs with colorful forms of embroidery. Romussi currently lives and work in Berlin, and is represented by THE PROJECT ROOM in Chicago, USA.
See more work by Jose Romussi: www.cargocollective.com/joseromussi/JOSE-ROMUSSI
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Blog entry by Sarah Gretsch in Berlin; Thursday, May. 9, 2013.
This article is part of our BLINK series, which introduces the practices of artists around the world. To read more BLINK articles, click here.
