On the edge of reality.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Painter Susana Romero of Paraguay

The mysterious tension between the rational and the imagined: It visits us at the edge of sleep, escorts us from the theater at a movie's end, tugs at us in a bittersweet song that holds a fleeting glimpse of the past. But if we try to freeze the action mid-frame or attempt to nail down concretely the specifics of those elusive moments, so often they slip through our grasp.

In her twenty-five years as a painter, Paraguay's Susana Romero has tried to bring to the canvas that mysterious sense of the transient. Whether she is depicting friends and family, the hot, windswept landscape near Asuncion, or, most recently, Paraguayan folk rituals, Romero embraces that moment of transition between what is and what could be. Her paintings are about feelings and choices, nostalgic "what ifs" that wash over her players time after time.

Recently, art critic Sarah Guerra described Romero's work as la escritura de la vida (the handwriting of life), and artist Ticio Escobar, in a monograph on the artist, used the word meta-linguistico. Both terms, more often applied to a discussion of language, accurately describe Romero's paintings. Her images are a kind of visual dialogue with herself, a muffled conversation about things on the edge of reality. Her preoccupation with the emotional side of things obviously places her in the expressionist camp, and indeed her heroes are artists such as Otto Dix, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. In her painterly stroke, with which she renders haunting, masklike visages, she also pays homage to Edvard Munch and James Ensor, for they too were intent upon mining deposits of suppressed feeling far below the surface.

"This tug between the mind and heart, between order and chaos is very Italian," Romero has observed. "Originally, my family came from Savona, near Genoa. In fact, in the 1960s I exhibited watercolors and drawings at the Centro d'Arte della Comuna di Savona. I've always been attracted to the wooden awkwardness of the so-called 'primitives' of the Quattrocento, that early stage of the Pre-Renaissance."

Argentine by birth, Romero moved to Paraguay with her family in 1968. Raising two young sons and a daughter at the time, she also began to find her way as an artist. "Like many creative women. I lived in two worlds. I had to strike a balance between my role as wife and mother and my painting in the studio. It wasn't an issue of feminism in my case. Some women struggle to find the support they deserve and that takes...