Romeo Alaeff
United States of America
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1970, Romeo secured a BA at the Tulane University in New Orleans before going onto achieve a MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Working across a number of different media, including drawing, print and film making, he has exhibited widely across America and Europe. Romeo’s work uses an unusual form of the Rorschach Test, where an image projected onto an "neutral" ink-blot is supposed to reveal to a therapist something hitherto obscured from the patient-theoretically, an unresolved conflict in their heart, mind or soul. His "inverted" Rorschach drawings are not meant to be neutral. Hidden within these ink-blots are actual images of conflict and war, not immediately obvious, but once discovered impossible to disregard.
"Given the marathon exertion that was required to create each Rorschach image and then print them up in Dundee, every trip back home to my cottage ended the same way...with me relieved, exhausted and staring blankly out of the train window at the rolling landscape for the entire five hour excursion. During this much needed decompression period, I was continually reminded that of all the information I had processed since arriving in the Highlands, I was without a doubt still most moved by the clichés: the seemingly endless northern skies, the heather covered hills, the cornucopia of wild flowers, the skittish deer and foxes, the over-sexed Scottish rabbits, the bat-like swallows from Africa, the annoying Hitchcockian Gulls swooping at my head, the Highland bulls who shamelessly foul themselves while grazing, the remarkable quiet, the solitude, and not least, the uninterrupted time. Because of that last fact especially, the relationship to my own process developed the most. Everything else (i.e. the project concept and technical aspects of the medium) advanced accordingly, but the process, given this gift of time, unfolded slowly and stubbornly, running over acres of crags before finding fertile ground. And though most of the seeds planted during that crucial time died disappointing deaths, occasionally (though precisely because it had the space to do so), a magic bean sprouted. It was not long afterwards that I found myself joyously scrambling up the treacherous beanstalk into the evil Giant’s lair. Now that the residency has come to a close, I still don’t want to climb down. Me and the Giant made friends." Romeo Alaeff 15/6/07
