VIDEOS

Click Here to View the Digital Exhibition Catalog: https://bit.ly/3lmSTSI Throughout his five-decade career, Michael Roque Collins has been recognized for his painterly images that are masterfully imbued with dramatic symbols of destruction and renewal. Referencing the overwhelming forces of the natural world, Collins conveys his scenes as metaphorical evocations of both the cyclical forces around us and the human struggle that can lead toward the possibility of renewal. The dark surreal landscapes included in Transmissions of Light appear to portray the ruins of a civilization from the distant past and in the process of being reclaimed by wilderness. In these paintings, Greco-Roman busts, Corinthian columns, temples, and other oblique references to classical sculpture and architecture have been long overtaken by entwining vines, looming trees, and massive flowers. “These architectural structures convey a sense of power and order,” Collins writes, “though ultimately their represented states are overgrown and consumed by a vision of a reclaiming verdant nature.” In this exhibition, the viewer travels through darkened forests, vibrant wooded vistas, dense copses of blooming vegetation, occasionally coming upon soothing clearings of water, isolated ruins, or perhaps the ghostly apparition of a human figure. Evoking a sense of dreamlike, post-apocalyptic pilgrimage, Collins ultimately brings his viewers to ascendant, open places filled with light and color. “This series brings forth the healing power of illumination, through my reoccurring interest in the heroic landscape, epic in scale and filled with elements of the sacred and mythological,” Collins writes.

Michael Roque Collins: Reliquaries Click Here to View Digital Catalog: http://bit.ly/MichaelRoqueCollins Through decades of creating post-symbolist art, Michael Roque Collins is recognized as a masterful painter of dream-inspired, imagined narratives. Drawing from imagery inspired by dream, personal memory, ancient artifacts and religious architecture, Collins explores metaphorical cycles of destruction and regeneration, spiritual realms of transcendence, environmental dangers, and redemptive hope. To Collins, dreams—for their surreal logic, obscure allusions, and counterintuitive insights—are profoundly relevant to interrupt the flow of the ordinary and challenge moribund thinking in our over-schematized contemporary world. In an exhibition entitled Reliquaries, Collins unveils a new series that directly addresses the power of dreams. Collins’ dream imagery suggests allusions to what Carl Jung might call the collective unconscious, while also incorporating personal symbolism of the artist’s own past: the subtropical environment of his childhood in Houston, as well as his father’s collection of Pre-Columbian and African artifacts that surrounded him as a child. His scenes feature a variety of cultural iconography evocative of both antiquity and personal history – an armchair, a toy boat, small sculptural fetishes – set in metaphorical landscapes and temple-like interiors informed by his travels to Venice, Florence, Pompeii and South America. These objects and their settings allude to cultural myth, to the psychology of the individual, to natural cycles of destruction, and to the possibility of renewal and transcendence of the spirit. Video © 2019 LewAllen Galleries Artwork © Michael Roque Collins

Houston artist Michael Roque Collins tells how, through his father's influence, he became the master artist he is today.

Michael Roque Collins: Inland Mountain Journey is on view at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, NM from October 27 - November 26, 2017. View Digital Catalog of Works: https://goo.gl/YsjY5y Video © 2018 LewAllen Galleries Artwork © Michael Roque Collins

the painter michael roque collins from houston