Mateo Romero Taos Pueblo Series

For the second year in a row, I spent late December in northern New Mexico. The art, the cuisine, the people, the landscape, and the culture have become a necessary refuge from where I live in Florida. I’ve visited the state multiple times each year since 2022. I have two more trips back already planned for 2025.

As an arts and travel writer with no kids and healthy parents, I’m travel constantly. Whenever anyone asks me where my favorite place is, and they ask me in Africa, Europe, and New York, I say New Mexico. Northern New Mexico specifically. I’ve still yet to see the southern part of the state.

A literal definition of “home” would be a place of residence; a more meaningful definition would be the place one feels they most belong. Using that definition, New Mexico is home to me now.

Mateo Romero, 'Th’aawi’ No. 1' at Manitou Gallery in Santa Fe. Photo by Chadd Scott.

The Best Painting in Santa Fe

During my most recent visit, I spent a few hours power-perusing the galleries around the Plaza in Santa Fe. I didn’t make it to Canyon Road and only stopped at Blue Rain Gallery in the Railyard Arts District. What I’m about to write in no way masquerades as a comprehensive survey of contemporary art in the city; it merely represents my personal experience.

Mateo Romero’s (b. 1966) Th’aawi’ No. 1 is the best contemporary painting in Santa Fe. His juicy, 48x60-inch depiction of Taos Pueblo under a brilliant blue sky is on sale for $13,700 at Manitou Gallery – the best gallery for contemporary painting in Santa Fe.

Romero, an enrolled member of Cochiti Pueblo, masterfully captures a bright, morning sun in winter reflecting off the adobe buildings. It’s a quiet scene. No people. One rez dog in the lower left corner. It’s a hopeful painting. Optimistic. Dashes of color – a green door, a purple window – animate its stillness. Landscape painting with feeling.

The painting is produced in Romero’s customary, instantly recognizable style. Using a palette knife to swab rich swaths of luscious oil paint across the canvas, Romero builds up the painting’s surface into something almost sculptural. He paints physically. Romero’s “hand” visible everywhere. A thousand readily apparent individual choices coming together in creating a uniform image.

Having spent the previous two days in Taos before going to Santa Fe, Romero nailed it. Taos Pueblo has been a common theme in Western art for more than 100 years. Romero puts a fresh spin on it. A liveliness. A dynamism. Taos Pueblo as not only a thing of the past, but a thing of the future as well.

Th’aawi’ No. 1 is part of an ongoing series of Taos Pueblo paintings from Romero. Manitou Gallery has more for sale, all good, none as good. The others are smaller, more affordable. More snapshot than cinematic. Medicine Man Gallery has a nice one as well.

I’ve been a fan of Romero’s since making my first visit to Santa Fe in 2018 and stumbling across his work. Those were from a previous series, Ogapogeh Owingeh, if memory serves. I was blown away. I still think about those paintings. Their vibrancy. While I’ve liked what Romero has produced in subsequent years, I haven’t loved it. Not until the Taos Pueblo paintings. These I love.

Romero’s Taos painting was the best by a living artist I saw in Santa Fe. Two pictures by Western art icons exceed it: E. Martin Hennings Going Home, Road to Taos Pueblo, Taos, N.M. (1945) at Owings Gallery and Earl Biss’ Unfinished Painting of an Untold Story 1990 – 1991 at Galerie Züger. Both belong in museums. Good ones. Both are priced that way. Over six figures.

The Biss painting owns an especially intriguing back story.

Biss, Apsáalooke, was painting a Plains Indian funeral scene depicting skeletons atop a platform. According to the gallerist, as the story goes, a tribal member saw the unfinished painting and told Biss the scene wasn’t something he should be painting. Biss ceased painting – maybe 90% complete. The painting is done, but unfinished, as reflected by the title and the artist signing the painting backwards in the upper left-hand corner, opposite the upper right, where Biss typically signs.

That’s where Romero generally signs as well. Romero was influenced by Biss.

Mateo Romero - Taos Series

Influence vs. Imitation

Ed Mell is the most imitated contemporary Western art. He passed in 2024. Galleries, especially across the Southwest, are filled with paintings so obviously “inspired” by Mell’s angular, desert version of the West they border on knockoffs.

All artists have influences. Picasso had influences. So did Ed Mell, but the widescale imitation of Mell’s artwork abuses his visual innovations. Influence is good. Imitation is bad.

Mateo Romero would be in the conversation for second most imitated contemporary Western artist. Vibrant, loose, fast, heavily impastoed, palette knife impressions of Northern New Mexico landscapes have become commonplace nearly to the point of trope in Western art galleries and magazines. Many of these paintings so closely recall Romero, they remind me of tribute bands.

Romero didn’t invent the genre. He gives credit to Louisa McElwain (1953–2013) for originating the style. Props to him for doing so, and props to him for taking McElwain’s inspiration and not imitating it, but making it his own. In too many of the Mell and Romero imitators, I don’t sense any attempt to be individual, more of an attempt to make their paintings just enough dissimilar from the originals so as not to risk copyright infringement. It’s a feel; you know it when you see it.

The market drives this to an extent. And capitalism. Ed Mell paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars, the few remaining available for purchase. A struggling artist and a struggling gallery may not be faulted for painting and selling cheaper “Ed Mell adjacent” artworks to shoppers who don’t care or know the difference.

Everyone has to eat, I get that, I also know great art, art like Ed Mell’s and Louisa McElwain’s and Earl Biss’ and Mateo Romero’s, is not market driven. I’ll spare you the clichés of where it comes from. Here’s hoping you have time in the upcoming year to spend with the originals and the opportunity of bringing a meaningful piece of art into your home, wherever that may be.