JÉRÔME ROMAIN

Title_Hosoi invert

$2,700

Medium_Oil on canvas

Size_116x81cm

Year_2023

“This painting was born on tour. I was traveling in the south oh France and Spain with Mark Oblow, a famous skateboard photographer, who had striking portrait of Chritian Hosoi.

All three of us share the sme sponsor (RVCA). That’s when the idea came to me. Christian Hosoi stands as a legendary figure in skateboarding history — not for his achievements in numbers, but for the singularity of his style. His movement, his presence in the air, turned speed into expression.”

In this work, Jérôme Romain does not offer a portrait in the traditional sense. Instead, he evokes a presence — the afterglow of a myth in motion. The painting captures a moment of suspension, where energy and elegance meet.

Hosoi is not just represented; he is invoked as a symbol of risk, freedom, and intensity — a legend both celebrated and re-imagined through the act of painting. Of all of life’s images, what do we have left?  This feeling, this impression that Proust described so well; the irradiant detail that we are incapable of seeing, to fixate on a moment in time and carry the true essence of things. This is the exact view that Jerome Romain has on objects, scenes and people of today. He reveals beauty, the beauty that seems banal and does not differentiate between tragedy and happiness. Ignored

The quality of his research techniques could have driven him toward hyper-realism. This is precisely where lies the difference; he does not paint the subject, he paints meticulously and methodically, the subject’s aesthetic reasoning demanding traces, tensions... And this ever so particular light towards the masters. Le Cavarage, Vermeer, De La Tour and most recently Hopper, which Romain comes close to, in his latest works, through cinematic framing.

Brushing aside the reality of verbiage and pathos, Jerome Romain’s work unveils his poetic dimension.

BACK→