Exhibition: October 18 - November 24, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, October 18, 5-7pm at
the Railyard Gallery Location Panel Discussion: Featuring Michael Roque Collins, Museum Curator and Art Writer Jim Edwards, and LewAllen Co-Owner Ken Marvel
Saturday, October 19, 2013 at 11 am
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri 10-6, Sat 10-5, Sun by appt.
Santa Fe, NM — On view from October 18 through November 23, 2013, LewAlllen Galleries at the Railyard presents Michael Roque Collins: Beyond Earth's Rhythms, an exhibition of important new paintings that represents a pivotal culmination of the artist's career-long evolution converging illumination, mystery and evocative imagery. The exhibit is the 50th solo show of work by this internationally recognized expressionist and post-symbolist painter.
In connection with the opening of the exhibition, LewAllen will also present at 11 a.m. on Saturday, October 19 a panel conversation entitled “Obedience to My Dreams,” focusing on the artist’s signature drive to invite the eye to travel beyond visual conventions of reality into mysterious illuminated realms of evocative imagery that he says is intended to “unveil the farthest shores of my soul”. Panel participants will include the artist, museum curator and art writer Jim Edwards, and gallery co-owner Ken Marvel. The artist will also sign copies of his monograph Sacred Landscapes: From Ruins to Resurrection.
Through a dynamic thirty-year engagement with oil paint and canvas, Collins cultivates singular complex relationships between cultural memory and personal history, mythology and the quotidian, abstraction and representation, as well as the spiritual and concrete. These newest works in the LewAllen exhibit explore deep tensions engendered from Earth-related cyclical patterns of creation and destruction as a mythic force. The paintings invoke various of the Earth's states of entropy -- tides, seismic transfiguration, thermal erosion, and volcanic forces -- as metaphorical signifiers of human struggle that lead toward the possibility of transcendence. Like erosion exposing the Earth's core, inner conflicts of human psychology lead toward revelations of the soul. In this new body of paintings, the forces of nature and their cycles of regeneration represent the odyssey of man.
Heralded as a key figure within post-symbolist Expressionism, Collins’ art is equally lauded for its visual and allegorical intensities. Dually portentous and promising, his works navigate between literal and symbolic landscapes that propose a dynamic plurality of possible meanings informed by both ancient and modern modes of transcendentalism. Analogizing the material and metaphysical to suggest archetypal forces of decay and renewal, his works are individuated by their assertive use of illumination, charismatic color combinations and rich surface textures. Collins’ pictorial techniques allude to the universal cycling between order and disorder, memory and history, enlightenment and darkness––root aspects of the human condition, the collective unconscious, and the natural order.
They are conduits to memories that lie deeply buried in Collins’ psyche, both as an adult and from a childhood spent in the midst of cultural iconography of Latin America, Africa and Asia, assembled by his scholar and artist father. The paintings imprint the artist’s sense of universal, archetypal memories of the sublime. An imagistic light comes from within, augmenting the sense of mystery and transforming metaphorical fields ofdarkness into parables of hope for the future.
Collins’ work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally and acquired by numerous museum and private collections. Collins has been honored with significant awards including the Bioethics and Human Rights Global Art Competition Prize from the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Press Contact: Karalee Hirst
khirst@lewallengalleries.com 505.988.3250