Empirical Nonsense

View Original

LINDSEY ROME

Extolling spontaneity and unfettered expression as virtues, Lindsey Rome fills her drawings with colorful abstract shapes and lines. 

In several pieces, one cannot escape the thought that the artist created her own Hieroglyphs. Visually, they are all more or less figurative, but they also represent real or abstract elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, yet all generally perfectly recognizable in form. True to character, the same sign can, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways.

Rome’s drawings seem to come from her direct visual engagement with the world rather than from an internal process of epistemic revelation. She takes inspiration from popular culture, graffiti art and cartoon characters. Yet, on occasion, the artist also seems to combine Robert Combas’ Figuration Libre style with Wassili Kandinsky's analyses on forms and colors, which result not from simple, arbitrary idea-associations but from her inner experience.