“These 75 paintings / collages / assemblages / bricolages by Candida Romero straddle centuries and genres, swamps and mythology. Taken in total they introduce us to a lost world and a newly discovered continent of this Afro-Gallic artist’s own making. Taken in total the painter’s brushstrokes reconstructions evoke temporality-violating voyages made to imaginary intergalactic wildernesses and to the civilized prison-houses that Flaubert’s Paris had readymade for the obediently feminine. Taken in total they recombinant visions of hell and visions of paradise in bold, even brazen painterly master strokes that crossbreed gothic romance and science fiction as ingeniously and as impetuously and as terrifyingly as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein did.”

“Even the casual observer will note that there are a large number of Romero’s works that border on monochromatic and feature thick, cloudy and unruly gray-green masses of paint and an equally large number which are more colorfully festive and playful in nature. [..] Of the more verdant ones I find myself especially enamored and enraptured by ‘Sisters’ where the diaphanous and crystalline delicacy of the crusty green patina appears to flirt with morbidity and disease via mildewed and fungal blacks, mentholated whites and sunset orange spackling.[..] In this painting and several others corpuscular dripping combines with the insistence cognition of text as texture. Here Romero makes us recall Cy Twombly, another artist for who abstraction and open hearted allusions to nature-painting are complimentary grooves for an improvisational painter.” — GT