Johnny Romeo

TV LAND

Converge Gallery

TV LAND is the latest mixed print and painting collection from internationally acclaimed Australian artist Johnny Romeo. Made up of 40 classic Johnny Romeo prints and four new original paintings, the series offers audiences an exhilarating insight into the electrifying works of Australia’s leading Pop artist. The opening night of the series also sees the official launch of the exhibition companion book, TV LAND; a visual compilation of Romeo’s works featuring written contributions from John-Ernest Dinamarca, and notable art writer and artist Matthew Rose. Celebrated the world over for his inimitable Neo-Expressionist Pop style, the works featured in TV LAND reveal Romeo at his most captivatingly colorful, culturally savvy, and visually bombastic.

Growing up during the glory days of Saturday morning cartoons, daytime soap operas and MTV, Johnny Romeo has often spoken of his desire to be a kind of television through his art making practice. The works featured in TV LAND, with their tongue-in-cheek appropriations of television icons, irrepressible punk energy, and psychedelic color explosions, powerfully capture Romeo’s undeniable knack for transforming his paintings into larger-than-life broadcasts of Pop culture.

Often described as a ‘Postmodern sampler’, Johnny Romeo’s works cheekily draw from the full spectrum of Pop culture. Superheroes and cult fiction villains such as Superman, Cat Woman and Darth Vader rub shoulders with classic silver-screen stars and musical martyrs in Romeo’s engrossing, neon-drenched visual TV LAND. Playing with the audience’s sense of nostalgia, Romeo cleverly harnesses the interplay between graffiti-like text and imagery in his paintings to subvert our relationship with popular television icons like Felix the Housecat (Grind, 2014).

Much like the intoxicating fields of color that flooded his television screen as a youth, the works featured in TV LAND are rife with vivaciously vibrant hues that reveal Romeo’s life-long fascination with color. A scintillating sugar-rush of summery, kaleidoscopic tones, Romeo’s use of color aims to evoke the same thrill experienced by Dorothy as she entered the magical Technicolor world of Oz. Works like Texas Grill (2015) and Super Line Back (2014), with their highly saturated, psychotropic fields of color, reflect Romeo’s fixation with television and its ability to transcend the hum-drum banality of ordinary life.

TV LAND, like the most innovative of television shows, ingeniously straddles the line between the accessible and the subversive, between the glossy veneer of TV and Pop culture’s seamier underbelly. Bursting at the seams with confectionary sweet color arrangements, irresistible Pop playfulness and grungy, graphic gusto, TV LAND delivers a knockout punch of Johnny Romeo classics that cements his place as the leading force in the global Neo-Expressionist Pop movement.

Opening night – Friday 18th September 2015 @ 6-9pm.

Converge Gallery | 140 W 4th Street, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, USA.  |   www.convergegallery.com

Any enquires regarding TV LAND can be made directly through Converge Gallery (john@convergegallery.com) or by calling the gallery on +1 570-435-7080.

Exhibition Dates:
September 18th – October 10th, 2015

September 13, 2015