Art: La révérence, huile sur toile by Jérôme Romain
NASA TEST SUBJECT
Magic Transistor, NASA, Spacesuit Tests, 1960s
Etch A Sketch an astronaut,
sheathed by a spacesuit’s anonymity,
standing before a camera
capturing the still-frame stirrings
of a man in pressurized clad.
He waves Hello at the shutter,
the orbit of his hand
sliced into a moving picture show’s
cascade of white.
You understand now?
All we see is a blur
like a dove flapping
through the sky’s bruises.
The black is swallowing the blue,
masking a view of our moon
as separated by a light-second’s
paper-wide divide.
How we cling in tandem
yet she’s only presented
one side of her pockmarked visage
to the astronaut in-training
finding rest on the floor
by gathering the memory
of her glow in his soft shell
encasement, a statue
breathing knots of entangled air.
About the author:
Keith Mark Gaboury earned a M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. His poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry Quarterly, New Millennium Writings, and on the podcast Who Do You Think You Are? Keith is a poet and preschool teacher in San Francisco, California.
Art: La révérence, huile sur toile by Jérôme Romain
In the artist’s words:
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. The quality of his research techniques could have driven him toward hyperrealism. 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.