María José Romero

Flow

| 2022

FLOW is an artistic intervention by María José Romero (Mexico City, 1970) consisting of a monumental work, specifically designed for a skatepark located in the Papagayo Park Gardens in Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico.

Mainly a painter, Romero works through the language of abstraction. She understands the creative process as an impulsive experience, incorporating her own body in the action of painting, almost as a performative experience, which conveys a very particular, organic and fluid poetic to the forms. In this sense, her paintings and drawings are generally based on the curved line, a formal element that has defined her elegant and subtle work.

These characteristics are very decisive in the definition and nature of FLOW and in the relevance of this art proposal. For the conception of this public art piece, María José Romero modified her painters traditional daily work alone in her studio, and began a collaborative practice, not only with architects, landscape and urban designers, but also with the skaters, the main users of the skate park. It is in this exercise of participation (quite unusual in the field of contemporary painting) where the public and civic potency of this intervention lies —totally unprecedented in Mexico —since it is the result of an original design that was mainly a consequence of its collective and democratic nature.

Based on the curved line that defines Romeros artistic language, the abstract gesture of the painting merges with the action of the skaters who draw imaginary lines on the rink with their skateboards.

It is also significant to consider how FLOW renovates and modernizes mural painting in the public domain, a tradition of great importance in the history of Mexican Art, from contemporary, urban, and civic artistic practices.

Carlos E. Palacios, 2022