David Gremard Romero's photostream

I am a gay, Mexican-American painter from Southern California currently living in San Francisco. This flickr account is devoted to my work - sculpture, painting, textiles, and performances, as well as to various sources of inspiration; primarily the paintings, book illustrations, and documents which have informed my work.

The central preoccupation unifying all my work is an engagement with the practice of the old masters, particularly those of the Baroque and Rococo periods. Their perfection of craft, their exploration of narrative modes, and their explicit connection to history and politics are a source of continuing fascination and inspiration to my work. Embedding contemporary iconography and themes in a classical figurative craft, I seek to tease out the hidden relationships and continuities between classical art and current culture.

The current body of work explores specifically the cultures and ideologies that formed during the colonial era of the New World, especially in California and Mexico, and the legacies that this conflict has had for our own world. The work takes primarily as its inspiration contemporary Mexican Lucha Libre; the Luchador costumes are treated as blank canvases on which the history of these conflicts can be depicted, transforming these histories into theatre and drama, and transfiguring the wearer, who can be anyone, into the historical characters, concepts and mythological figures the costumes represent, while bringing the ancient stories into a contemporary context. The style of the paintings references both Pre-Colombian art forms and European or Colonial paintings, creating a synthesis of the two, and the costumes, while my design, were hand embroidered by the Zapotec Indians of Southern Mexico, and incorporate traditional motifs to suggest continuities between their (and my) ancient forbears and our current culture.

Feel free to contact me at dgremard@earthlink.net S