Artist Statement

Vero Romero is a Mexican oil painter based in Los Angeles. Her exhibition Altera reflects on the shifting boundaries between human and animal identity. Throughout the work, animal presences emerge as spiritual guides and counterparts within a narrative of transformation and return. In these encounters, human identity is temporarily loosened, allowing the self to move beyond its familiar boundaries. 

Drawing from global mythologies of animal metamorphosis and spirit embodiment, such as Mesoamerican shapeshifting traditions like nahualismo, Romero explores the desire to step outside fixed human roles. The paintings imagine a temporary release from the expectations, identities, and social structures that shape and define the self. 

The works unfold through a recurring sequence of invocation, offering, transformation, and return, framing metamorphosis as a cyclical process rather than a singular event. Fruit, flowers, and candlelight appear as ritual offerings, while encounters with animal deities mark stages within this passage. Together, these elements create a visual rhythm that traces the movement from invocation through transformation and, ultimately back to the human world. 

Within this cycle, the ego is not erased but softened, momentarily set aside in favor of other ways of being. This altered, embodied state allows the self to exist outside rigid social expectations and to become grounded in instinct, intuition, immediacy, and presence. Altera ultimately presents transformation as a continual rhythm of departure and return: a negotiation between structure and instinct, the human and the animal, and the selves we shed and those we carry back with us.