Eric Romero paints a New Mexico that resists easy reduction. His work does not begin with the postcard West, the cinematic desert, or the polished roadside mythology that has come to stand in for the region. It begins closer to the ground: in family histories, devotional objects, farm work, tools, cars, neighborhood streets, inherited craft, and the layered cultural life of Albuquerque.
His forthcoming exhibition, *Querencia*, opening September 25 at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, gathers many of those concerns into a new body of paintings. Classical in technique but contemporary in their emotional and cultural vocabulary, Romero’s works draw from Catholic imagery, mythology, automobile culture, agricultural labor, family memory, and the Hispano folk traditions of New Mexico.
The results are precise without being precious. A painting may contain the formal gravity of devotional art alongside the ordinary materials of daily life. A glove, a screwdriver, a rosary, a shop sign, a car, or a child’s presence can carry the same symbolic charge as an older sacred emblem.
## A Language of Place
Romero grew up in a New Mexican farming family south of Albuquerque and is based in the city today. That movement between rural inheritance and urban life runs quietly through his work. His subjects are shaped by the landscape and people of Nuevo Mexico, but also by the distinctive visual world of Albuquerque: Central Avenue, classic cars, workshop culture, roadside commerce, family homes, and the dense intersection of old and new.
He is widely described as a self-taught painter, while his public education history also includes study at the University of New Mexico. More important than any credential is the path visible in the paintings themselves. Romero has absorbed the technical discipline of old master painting and brought it into contact with a personal archive formed by comic books, religious art, local history, family stories, and the visual atmosphere of the Southwest.
Catholicism is a recurring presence, not as a decorative reference but as a living language of image and memory. Retablos, bultos, santos, rosaries, and the compositional structures of devotional art inform the way he frames figures and objects. These traditions sit beside elements drawn from contemporary New Mexican life, allowing the paintings to move between the sacred and the ordinary without treating either as separate.
## Secular Saints
Romero has often returned to the idea of the secular saint. His paintings give ordinary people an iconographic presence, using the formal vocabulary of religious art to elevate subjects embedded in contemporary life. The gesture is both tender and expansive. It recognizes dignity in people whose histories, work, and identities have not always occupied the center of American art.
The approach is rooted in a larger understanding of cultural continuity. In Romero’s work, heritage is not a fixed set of symbols waiting to be preserved behind glass. It is something carried in gestures, households, labor, and family relationships. It survives through the work of people who make, repair, teach, pray, remember, and pass things along.
His grandfather’s leatherwork is among the personal inheritances that feed this sensibility. So are the farm landscapes of his childhood, the material culture of Albuquerque, and the devotional forms associated with Hispanic New Mexico. A painting can therefore become a meeting place between a family object and a larger cultural history.
Romero’s compositions often contain hidden symbolism, but their meanings do not depend on a single explanation. A tool may suggest labor or repair. A vehicle can hold associations of mobility, memory, aspiration, and time. Religious imagery may invoke faith, doubt, protection, or the persistence of family ritual. The paintings allow these readings to accumulate rather than insisting on a closed interpretation.
## Along Central Avenue
Route 66 runs through Albuquerque as Central Avenue, and Romero’s visual world has long included the road’s automobile culture and commercial language. Here, the Mother Road is not isolated from the rest of the city’s life. It is part of a larger environment of storefronts, classic cars, signs, workshops, movement, and generational memory.
In *Querencia*, Romero’s new paintings explicitly engage Route 66. One work involving his daughter brings together the highway’s mythology with westward-moving geese, shop gloves, and a screwdriver. The painting considers the work involved in carrying culture across time, particularly when movement and change are unavoidable.
The imagery is characteristic of Romero’s wider practice. His objects are never merely props. They arrive with histories of use. Gloves suggest hands and labor. A screwdriver carries the possibility of maintenance, adjustment, and repair. The highway evokes passage, departure, commerce, and the changing face of the built environment. The child introduces a future that is still being formed.
This is an Albuquerque understood from within its cultural texture. The familiar symbols of roadside America remain present, but their meanings are altered by their proximity to faith, family, craft, and the local histories embedded in the city’s streets.
## The Meaning of Querencia
The exhibition’s title offers a useful key to Romero’s work. *Querencia* can describe a place of attachment, belonging, or return. In New Mexico, the word carries a particular emotional force, suggesting that home may be both physical and inherited: land, family, language, ritual, memory, and the accumulated knowledge of a place.
Romero does not present belonging as uncomplicated. His paintings acknowledge change, mobility, and the pressure exerted by time. The people and objects in his work exist within a culture that is continuously adapting, absorbing influences, retaining traces, and remaking itself.
His young daughter’s presence in this new work gives that process a human scale. The question is not simply what will endure, but what forms of attention are required for anything meaningful to endure at all. The surrounding imagery points toward labor. The road points toward movement. The geese extend the sense of migration and seasonal return.
Such images do not offer nostalgia as an answer. They are more interested in the active, sometimes difficult process of carrying a world forward.
## A Larger West
Romero’s paintings broaden familiar ideas of Western art without announcing the act as a correction. His New Mexico contains Catholic iconography, Hispano folk traditions, agricultural work, family craftsmanship, Chicano identity, automobile culture, and the dense social life of Albuquerque. These are not peripheral details added to a preexisting Western story. They are the story.
In place of an empty, mythic frontier, Romero offers people with ancestors, beliefs, work, possessions, and obligations. In place of generalized Western imagery, he offers a local vocabulary shaped by the specific histories of Hispanic New Mexico. The visual force of the paintings lies in this specificity: their capacity to make a tool, a saint, a child, a family heirloom, or a street scene feel connected to larger questions of memory and identity.
*Querencia* promises a body of work grounded in that understanding. Romero’s paintings are concerned with what people inherit, what they maintain, and what they transform. They hold the past close without mistaking it for a finished thing.