Amelia Romeo

Romeo Amelia (full name Genoveffa Grazia Amelia Romeo) is a painter, born in Reggio di Calabria, who completed classical studies through to her degree. She worked in the state's financial administration and is a journalist and a member of the FNSI, as well as the author of essays on history and poetry, as can be seen on her websites. In the world of painting, she is self-taught and has consistently pursued a style of her own that stubbornly refuses to align with current trends. She has exhibited in many important galleries, with both solo and group shows, and has received various awards. From an early age she loved colour and drawing, and she has an innate sense of imagination, which over time she has learned to project onto canvas as mental images. This imagination has never ceased, and does not cease, to suggest new possibilities in familiar matter, projecting it into different dimensions and giving it, each time, different meanings and substances. It is a spontaneous imagination, unlike the classic surrealist world, which needed to carry dreams out of the realm of sleep into material reality in order to justify them. It is a spontaneous fantasy that arises the moment she closes her eyes and sees beyond. Being an artist is for her a mindset and a permanent way of thinking, not one filtered only intermittently by a state of unconsciousness until it is carried into waking awareness. It is a way of being for someone who sees beyond and seeks to bring what she sees to this side, so that it can be shared and so that others may understand that it is possible to dream and to constantly create different worlds and dimensions, despite all the difficulties of everyday life. It is a winning mindset that does not founder in the face of scepticism and pays it no heed. This mindset led her to begin exhibiting as early as 1989 in Portovenere, La Spezia, and later in various locations in Italy and around the world, up to the present day, and eventually to create an Artistic Manifesto that she named METAINTERALUX, deposited with the Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali. It is a mindset that signifies a new way of conceiving painterly expression, distant from traditional schemes, in which the subject of any kind or type is seen as removed from the earthly dimension, and even the earthly dimension itself is projected into other dimensions. Consequently, nothing is any longer subject to the classic canons of the refraction of light and, at times, even of depth, because in the imagined dimension everything is light, its source is everywhere, so that every subject, object or landscape is totally bathed in it and, likewise, is lit from every possible angle. It is the play of imagination that determines the forms and situations, each time, creating ever-different dimensions according to the perception of the moment or the real situation experienced, which inevitably brushes against it. It is a going beyond, because in that dimension there is peace, harmony and beauty; it is essentially a closing of the door behind one on the known world, the one we encounter every morning and with which we reckon, and a soaring into a somewhere else that soothes. This is Amelia Romeo's way of making art, a way that critics are now beginning to describe as original.