robert weiss : look what we have here
October 18, 2025 - November 22, 2025
Press Release
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(Dallas) Ro2 Art proudly presents Look What We Have Here, a solo exhibition by Dallas-based painter and filmmaker Robert Weiss, whose work bridges the tactile and the temporal through a synthesis of abstraction, figuration, and constructed memory. In this new body of work, Weiss delves into the instability of history—how images, surfaces, and techniques preserve, distort, and reassemble meaning over time. Through layers of paint and process, he invites viewers to consider the ways personal and collective narratives collide, fracture, and reform into something newly resonant. Weiss’ meticulous yet intuitive approach transforms painting into excavation—scraped, poured, and reassembled surfaces that mirror the messy sediment of memory itself. Each piece becomes both artifact and reflection: a meditation on what is remembered, what is lost, and how art keeps both alive. Through this lens, Look What We Have Here becomes both a meditation and an invitation—a space where material, memory, and meaning converge. Weiss transforms the act of painting into an inquiry about perception itself: what we preserve, what we forget, and what remains after the image settles. The exhibition continues Ro2 Art’s commitment to presenting artists whose work challenges and expands the language of contemporary art.
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About the Artist
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Robert Weiss (b. 1983, Galveston, TX) is a painter and filmmaker based in Dallas. His work explores the layered intersections between history, memory, and material, often merging abstraction and figuration through deeply tactile processes. Weiss received his BFA in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in Painting from Syracuse University, where he studied under Jerome Witkin. A dedicated educator for over two decades, Weiss currently teaches Filmmaking at The Episcopal School of Dallas and previously served as an Associate Professor of Drawing at Syracuse University. He has been recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award and Teacher of the Year Award from Galveston Independent School District for his impact on students and community. In addition to his studio practice, Weiss co-directed the acclaimed documentary Song of the Cicada (2022), which received the Audience Award at Austin Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Lone Star Film Festival. His paintings have been featured in numerous exhibitions, including Witkin & Weiss: Wonderful Demands at Ro2 Art (2024), which celebrated his mentorship with Jerome Witkin. Weiss’ practice continues to evolve through a dialogue between the tactile and the temporal—balancing reverence for tradition with the freedom of experimentation.
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exhibition statement
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"My work examines how history is flattened, preserved, and distorted through technique. I use painting and constructed tableaux to collapse layers of time, compressing historical fragments into contemporary form. What emerges is less a reconstruction of the past than a reflection on how it is shaped, rewritten, and staged in the present. The process itself is central. Surfaces are built up, scraped down, cut apart, peeled back, obscured, poured, cleaved, and rearranged. The work leaves traces that mirror the way memory and history accumulate: messy, subjective, and unfinished, and points toward the friction between personal memory and collective history, where private experience meets public narrative. I draw formally on motifs that already carry historical weight: dazzle camouflage patterns, architectural geometries, and modular grids. These visual systems were designed to direct perception, to confuse or organize how something is seen. By cutting, painting, and reassembling these structures, I push them into a state of instability where clarity slips and meaning fractures. However, it is possible to reassemble them into something even more unique and more beautiful.
All artwork, including mine, is preservation that risks distortion. By pulling from art historical imagery, symbolic patterning, and constructed environments, I create fractured spaces where viewers confront both the weight of tradition and the instability of its transmission. The result is work that holds onto history while questioning its authority. My paintings and installations are not about nostalgia or reverence but about how reality is mediated through layers of influence, technique, and interpretation. They ask what is remembered, what is lost, and who gets to decide. It’s also a celebration of the lived experience, where a good idea might otherwise go lost if it were not embedded into an art object. I hope you will take a moment to look what we have here." - Robert Weiss, 2025 |
