This exhibition is about the experience of simultaneity, and it is materialized in many ways, in its making, in its presentation, and in its organization and production. Word history appears here as a meshing of particular histories in which divisions of West and East, North and South, modern and traditional become irrelevant. African masks, European Catholic Madonnas, and bourgeois landscapes are put side by side to create a new meaning. Historical narratives that tell about wars, conquest, kings, and discoveries are stripped of their meaning and reshaped to uncover hidden texts. Romberg, as an alchemist, recombines these words to create aphorisms by which he comments about universal truths and human feelings. All these images and texts are presented on transparent sheets to express once again the indivisibility of human experience, the impossibility to separate the past from the present and the far from the near. The configuration of the installation enables the viewer to live out this simultaneity. By eliminating traditional hierarchies a new perception of world history, art history and the role of the artist can emerge. What started as a historical narrative, becomes an architectural space where people can circulate freely experiencing the interrelation of histories. Through this basically humanistic project Romberg addresses today's transnational and multicultural world. Indeed, the fact that what you are seeing now is presented in other places at the same time, is a living proof of the possible webs of communication that unite distant places and people. Romberg uses light materials to achieve this global, de-territorialized experience. Art for him is to be experienced by all, not to be kept for only a privileged few. The upside down Cathedral of Cologne that you see is a reminder of the privileged place that has been given to the art of the West and to the privilege of style over meaning. Romberg keeps this trope as a reminder of the dangers that such an exclusionary attitude can have, and of what he wishes to erase. Through his obsession with simultaneity, and dealing with culture as a whole, Romberg transcends the crisis of representation. The installation "+2000/-2000, Even" allows us to perceive the universal history of mankind as a space of infinite metaphors. Osvaldo Romberg was born in 1938 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and lives in New York. He had numerous exhibitions all over the world: in Latin America, United States, Europe and Israel. In 1993 the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien presented his works.
