Echolalia
I like the word echolalia because it sounds like a garden of echoes, like an abundance of echoes. Echolalia is actually immediately and compulsively repeating what another person, or oneself, says. I want to use the word in a broader sense to talk about that act of emptying oneself and surrendering to repetition. I think of echolalia as the desire to become an echo.  

These are all appropriate associations. I build my pieces through repetitive structures. The repetition of marks and forms is what gives my works unity and allows them to expand. It's a strategy. But there's another sense in which this room is a garden of echoes. All these pieces somehow bear the traces of the teachers and artists here in Puerto Rico who taught me to live through art. These works I present offer something transformed, perhaps expanded, enriched by my years abroad; but they are connected and indebted to those original experiences. The essence of the echo is that it returns, and so here I am, back through my art.

About my art
This exhibition includes recent works alongside some earlier pieces to provide context. My recent works are assemblages made mostly of paper, cardboard, and canvas. To construct them, I repeat mark patterns on separate surfaces. The patterns find themselves and connect the sections randomly. In this way, the pieces accumulate and the piece grows organically.

The works accumulate patterns or systems of marks to create visual uncertainty. When there is density, the relationship of the marks to the surface becomes blurred. Repetition functions as camouflage. Although my works are tactile and have evidently been touched by hand, they create a primitive optical effect. I love the idea that something eminently tactile and perishable can create an immaterial effect. Some of my pieces are like handmade Op Art.

My works seek an ambivalent space, an absolute or ecstatic space, where marks are simultaneously present and absent; they are haptic and disembodied, existent and illusory. A place where marks exist in our space and elsewhere. “Here” and “there.”

Biography
Luis Romero is a Puerto Rican artist who has lived in Chicago since 1998. He received his MFA in Drawing and Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his BA in Philosophy, Literature, and Film from Boston University. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is featured in important public and private collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the US Department of State, the Fidelity Corporate Collection, and the Deutsche Bank Collection, among many others. Ecolalia is his first exhibition in Puerto Rico.