Samuel Roa Mejia, aka Leumas Roa, was born in Irapuato, Mexico on December 18th, 1970.
He spent his childhood and youth in his country completing compulsory school, attending a technical high school and then two years of computer engineering at the TEC in Celaya, Mexico.
At 21 he decides to change his life and joins a non-profit organization that takes him for three years as an intern in Africa, first in Zambia then in Tanzania. Between 1994-2000 first in Mexico and then in England he obtained degrees (Bachelor's degrees) in Philoso-phy and Theology respectively at the Queretaro Institute and at Middlesex University in London.
Since 2001 he has lived in Italy.
Since childhood he has cultivated a passion for pencil drawing and the study of perspective. As a self-taught man, he participated in various school and local competitions and then continued with the experience of oil painting. During his stay in Africa he was able to use his artistic skills in the decoration of churches by painting walls, both with "murals" and with geometric elements.
In recent years he has resumed his art with more constancy and started a path of experimentation and exploration, moving from traditional painting to abstract and figurative painting of his ideas using acrylic colors, metal and developing a penchant for sculpture. At the moment the artist prefers to seek or at least try to express his intuitions to the maximum through slender, dynamic and contrasting forms that do not stifle the intuition itself but on the contrary enhance and free it. Minimum of shape to release the maximum yield.
His Mexican roots can be seen in his works where bright and bright colors are often the center of attention, like the real protagonists that "explode" and flow out of the paintings, generally against a white background and almost always with a three-dimensional element or distinctive prominence in Leumas's own works. The artist does not try to adapt or just to "satisfy" in the viewer a need for beauty or harmony, he does not try to satisfy it, but rather to offer him the unexpected, involving him to question himself on various top-ics of his experience of him.
If possible, according to Leumas, a work of art should be experienced with a musical background, thus allowing to add a 4th dimension to the experience of the beholder: this dimension is time, that is to live an experience that begins and dies. ... or maybe not. A work of art can in fact also be destroyed but the experience lived by those who have con-templated it will never die. This is why Leumas really likes the phrase: "art is an experience, not an object”.