Roma is a series of astonishing oil paintings by British artist Roni Stretch that experiment with the limits of perception:

Viewing them is akin to adjusting one’s eyes in a darkened room. Images gradually appear as fields of solid colour, seen again from another angle, the same forms recede, swallowed by their backgrounds.

The LA-based artist's paintings represent the first moments of putting pencil to paper (taken from his Fabriano Roma sketchbook) and starting to create — Stretch views the initial, discarded thoughts as the purest forms of work, elevated into an entirely new body of work by the unravelling of the once discarded paper.

Painted in a limited palette spanning from white to black, the unravelled paper is rendered through minute gradations, its folds and dents quietly articulated by Stretch’s mastery of his brush strokes.