ROBERT WEISS
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Look What we have here
Look What We Have Here
Ro2 Art Gallery
2606 Bataan St., Dallas, TX 75212
October 18 – November 22, 2025
Opening Reception: October 18, 7–10pm
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.
Artist Statement
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.
About the Artist
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.
About Ro2 Art
Founded in 2010 by Susan Roth Romans and Jordan Roth, Ro2 Art is a contemporary gallery located in Dallas's Tin District. The gallery champions a focused roster of emerging, mid-career, and established artists working across disciplines, with a bold curatorial program that defies easy classification and rewards deeper engagement. Known for its adventurous exhibitions and an evolving new media initiative, Ro2 Art cultivates a space where discovery, risk, and dialogue thrive. Twice named “Best Art Gallery” by the Dallas Observer and a recipient of the Obelisk Award, Ro2 Art continues to play a vital role in shaping the cultural landscape of North Texas and beyond.
Contact: Jordan Roth, (214) 406-8819
www.ro2art.com
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Robert Weiss was born in Galveston, Texas in 1983. He moved to Dallas to attend Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts. After Graduating high school, he moved to Baltimore to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art to study Painting and Printmaking. After receiving his BFA in printmaking, Robert relocated back to Texas where he taught painting, drawing, film and ceramics at Ball High School in Galveston. Robert, along with his students at Ball High School, created a film titled Ike: A Documentary The Story of A torn City Rebuilt by Everyday Heroes. The film reveals the devastating and catastrophic effects Hurricane Ike impacted Galveston with and the incredible resilience of the community following. During that time he was honored to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the Teacher of the Year Award from Galveston Independent School District for his notable work on the documentary and with the students. Following his 5-year teaching career in Galveston, Robert then went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University in New York where he studied painting and drawing under Jerome Witkin. During that time he worked as an Associate Professor of drawing for 2 years. Today, Robert currently teaches film at the Episcopal School of Dallas while continuing to work on his own short narrative films, documentaries and paintings. During his summers he works on collaborative film projects in France and attends artist residency programs with an emphasis on painting and drawing. Robert is co-founder of Exposition Gallery, an independent gallery that presents works by contemporary artists in historic Exposition Park.
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Artist Statement
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Paintings are repositories of human intention that make permanent something that could be lost. My work is a combination of allegory and technical processes that work together to form a tableau that hint at artistic and historical references. These tableaus become an amalgamation of ideas, styles, representations and processes, with layers of disconnected symbols and objects. I forcibly connect themes and techniques with the intent to initiate a deeper exploration of the narratives that are sparked by viewing them.
Painting becomes a way to absolve my knowledge of art history and the plastic arts, challenging my preconceived notions on the formal rules established through educational discipline, highlighting my skepticism of the art world and postmodernism. In my work I incorporate a breadth of subject matter that can guide the choices I make through my processes and material handling; through deliberate employment of artistic variations, my process helps me expand the possibilities of the representation in my content. The painting itself becomes a conduit for creative thought. It is my belief that the best paintings relate to each other throughout the span of history, and this dialogue is revealed through the way in which each piece was created in conjunction with its subject matter. Artifacts can be difficult to explicate from their context in history, evident in ancient cultures forgotten to history except for objects we discover after their time. Creating art that incorporates elements of these relics underlines their import in the context of art’s evolution over time, while creating a fresh dialogue for the artifacts within the framework of the art it influenced. If image-making is a form of non-verbal dialogue that stretches from man’s early cave paintings to the modern museum installation, giving deeper insights into the interests and rites of man throughout history, then my image-making reveals a desire to be considered within this lineage of great art while at the same time aiding me in the pursuit of understanding my own complex needs and those of the society in which I live. Many of my tableaus can be considered a form of “set dressing,” with a stage and emphasis on space coordination, turned surreal by the juxtaposition of recognizable designs, and made further surreal by the malleability of paint’s nature, allowing for the reproduction of objects and non-objects alike in such a way as to create a seemingly very real physical presence between them. Each application of paint is like building a compost pile: the material becomes the rich organic material to grow an image. The viewer investigates the symbolic gestures of the painting, from pigments to content, through suggestions or negations of space; allegory and material work together to maximize an experience. I work through my skepticism of political structures, the art world, and postmodernism, with intent to build an emotional climate for the viewer to enter; there is no overt narrative to attribute to the work. At the point it is observed, my artistic choices stack up and compound, inducing an exploration for clarity, with intention as a means of realization. |
