Christine Romanell’s three-dimensional paintings explore physics, relativity, and design principles. Her fractals build upon one another in endless tessellations and permutations, building off the pictorial, illusionary space of the panel and entering into the three-dimensional world. Colorful and prismatic, Romanell’s paintings seek to span time, material, and culture. Her work has been featured on the Smithsonian Channel and she is a recipient of an NEA grant for her work through Chashama in NYC. The artist received a 2022 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her work is held in the private collection of Pat Bell alongside Tom Nussbaum and Willie Cole and the collection of the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. She has lectured at Pratt University and taught at the College of St.  Elizabeth and Bergen County Community College. Her BFA is from the School of Visual Arts (NYC) and her MFA is from Montclair State University, NJ.

Artist Statement

My colorful dimensional paintings and installations explore non-repeating patterns informed by cosmology and sacred geometry, while rooting the work in applied design similar to Islamic patterning. I use rotational symmetry to generate dimensional forms that allude to movement and create an event horizon - a space where the infinite tessellations of universal physics can intersect with patterns, collapsing the divide between the theoretical and the real.

The source material for my layered constructions come from the properties of self-similarity - meaning the same form at different scales. Fractals are the most common example of self-similarity. These patterns channel a deeper meaning that transcend the merely decorative. The repetition of difference is a means of transformation. Descriptive and evocative, pattern is an imitation of the infinite.

If these patterns permeate such a wide span of time, material, and culture, could we be tapping into something much larger than ourselves? Carl Sagan once said, “We are all made of star-stuff.” That longing for connection to the origins of creation is the driving force behind all my work.