Pregnant ruins of ruins that give birth to ruins. This is the geometry of the virtual space Eduardo Romo pretends to conquer by means of his False Structures, an ephemeral construction project within another ephemeral sculpture - if by the ruins of time we abide ourselves-, which uses the image of faith as foundation of an empire diminished by reason, physics and marketing. The principal nave of the Ex-Convento de Santa Teresa seems pregnant with the creative fecundity of the author of just one piece in two instances. An obelisk, tower or reversed pyramid positioned in a vertical way and another one horizontal symbolize the Cartesian plane of our moral axiology, where the dogmatic parables float, the semantic hyperboles and the philosophical, political and economic tangents crumble as they glimpse, in the dawn of the 21st century, the third dimension: The unpredictable axis of the Zeds, granting antipode and complementary values, as it arouses and diminishes the quality or validity of one speech as opposite to another. Beginning and end; positive and negative; light and darkness; faith, credulity and agnosticism touch and disrupt each other to recreate the new order of things.
This mechanism is the great metaphor, the plastic synthesis that demonstrates the schism in which not only the faith lays today, but the civilization structure per se, as we know it (we might say the structurity), of what has given sustenance to the occidental cultural operation for the last two thousand years. The fact that the author built these structures - which are not false but real, and demonstrate a palpable untruth expressly - and introduce them as a virus hidden in the main nave of the former church of Santa Teresa, quivers its backbone with the cornerstone of the institution.
The name of the exhibition contains an apparent paradox, in the style of an oxymoron announcing the trick in which we will be involved. It is supposed that for nature a structure cannot be false. If so it would not work. The structure of DNA, which is not a true concatenation of biochemical events, is a mutation that eventually destroys the organism containing it. This is the approach Romo seeks to challenge regarding the structure and functional model of contemporary society. And he does so through these physically contradictory pieces. A tower that widens as it grows until it overflows onto itself; is the minimal semantic unit that expresses the development just as the mythical uroboro who bites its tail every time it opens its mouth devouring itself in a predator’s quest. This simulation of greatness leaves critical tracks by devaluating the quality of the materials that supposedly are the foundations that project solidity and permanence, revealing the falsehood of the dogmatic and ideological euphemisms that only have served to support a puppet montage. So weak seems today the myth on which the largest management of faith was built, and in which the collective imagination of major humanity has been cultivated
Just as Galileo, who in the 16th century questioned the astronomical model to demonstrate that the Earth was not the center of the planetary system, thereby changing the scientific paradigms known at that time, Romo’s involvement invites us to question the logic of the equation height-size-width equals to greatness, opposite to the fissures through which the detritus of the institution filters. Why should we ignore this neo-Babel of beliefs that have degenerated the Christian faith into dissident splits seeking answers that the Catholic clergy has denied, believing they can keep the spiritual power over the souls? Why don’t we look the same way into everything else and question structures such as the social contract, work, economy, education, marriage, family, who once helped build a civilization that seems to be culminating? Perhaps we are sitting in the front row, waiting for its collapse. Is False Structures the trailer before the feature film of the destruction that announces the end of the world we know, making way for a better or different world into a more consistent container with the humanity we are today?
In the hallways of the church the speech continues, where the author hits the nail on the head with twelve multiform structures, as closed shrines, through which the spectator will confront the mystery of faith or choose to access the scientific malice of the proof that dilutes any memory of innocence. And in the chapel of the spirits there is a video with the record of the construction of the towers and their eventual collapse. Maybe the form of every sacred sarcophagus answers to the morphology of its contents? Or is it that every myth acquires the shape and size the believer awards to it? Could it be that in the center of the hurricane there is nothing? This is the structural treatment with which Romo quivers our beliefs questioning the historical existence of Jesus, the improbable virginity of Mary or the institutional perversion that forces priests to chastity. It is in the spectator's decision to approach the mystery and reveal it or to remain subject to the power of the lie.
Jose Manuel Ruiz de Regil
Writer and art critic, Mexico City, July 2012
From Abstract Nomadism to the Aestheticization of the Everyday
Being an artist now means to question the nature of art
Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy, 1969
1. The Empire of Aesthetics
It was Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) who coined the term aesthetics to designate a new philosophical discipline which should examine art and the nature of beauty. As a philosophical reflection on art, aesthetics reached its climax with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegelian aesthetics (a spiritual philosophy of art) is a prophecy about the end of art. It is a "funeral prayer," according to the neo-Hegelian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Moreover, Hegel's prophecy also announces the collapse of traditional aesthetics. It so happens that much of the twentieth century art was a reaction against the traditional concept of aesthetics. The authors, trends and artistic movements which questioned the traditional notion of art in that century, confirmed in practice the apocalyptic Hegelian vision. Hegel presaged the demise of form in art and this "evaporated" over that century. This was possible thanks to a long path of artistic deconstruction, which was a process of both de-definition and de-aestheticization of art.
In the 1910s, Marcel Duchamp, postmodern magician, pulled out of the hat a urinal that would eventually transform art. Andy Warhol, cold icon of the sixties, joined the enterprise and transformed commercial products into art objects. The result of these subversive positions soon became evident. The aestheticization of the everyday, the idea that any object, however banal or ordinary, is potentially an art object, eventually prevailed. Suddenly, all our everyday life became aesthetic. Today everything can be art, since there is no demarcation between the art object and the everyday object; the boundary between art and reality disappeared.
Contemporary aesthetics does not seek to pry into our senses to reveal the essence of art and the mystery of beauty. Contemporary aesthetics increasingly conforms to the new regime of art. It is no longer an aesthetics of the artworks, but an aesthetics of the attitudes, experiences, procedures, projects and follies of contemporary artists. Nowadays aesthetics is everywhere: on billboards, shoe boxes, soda bottles, car tires, football games, chocolate cakes ... Today aesthetics no longer asks the question: What is art?, but rather: How can we make art?, When is there art?, Why does art exist? In the global village of art, can anyone escape from the empire of Aesthetics?
Looking at the Object
In 2006, Eduardo Romo (Mexico City, 1966) changed the direction of his production. After years of working and experimenting with sculpture, he decided to claim his right to contemporaneity and join the global art of our times. Then he began the project: Looking for Otherness, a reflection on the art object and its relationship to the everyday object. Questioning his own sculptural work, Romo chose one of his works, a circular wooden sculpture, and searched for similar objects in the urban environment. For four months, he walked around Mexico City looking for the referents of his three-dimensional piece: urban objects similar to the sculpture in their basic structure, regardless of differences in terms of color, material, size or texture. In the words of the artist, this project was: the story of an abstract sculpture that walks around Mexico City looking for its identity in the objects that are similar or belong to its family.
This story of abstract nomadism had a happy ending. The circular sculpture found objectual brothers and sisters here and there. Romo took pictures of these family reunions to record what was just the beginning of his new adventure.
After his discovery of the aesthetics present in the urban landscape, Eduardo Romo decided to be more ambitious and further expand his project to continue reflecting on the aestheticized object of our times. In his current project: Seven Looks of the Object Towards the Idea of the Object, he reflects on the general aesthetics that characterizes the globalized world in which we live. The project consists of seven works which are strategies for the artist to approach the everyday object. In each and every one of them, Romo explores the interaction between the object and its environment, to demonstrate that a particular object is just an object until we call it a work of art and, at the same time, that the work of art is itself an object. Romo approaches everyday reality, focuses on the objects, studies them in their context, manipulates them, analyzes their color, shape and material, to finally discover their aesthetic qualities and include them in his new discourse.
Aware of the existence of a comprehensive aesthetics, convinced that everyday objects can produce effects similar to those awakened by traditional art objects, sure that contemporary artists have in this world an almost inexhaustible arsenal to create art, Eduardo Romo started a new stage in his production three years ago, according to the requirements of the mainstream movement. For this sculptor and visual artist, artistic production can no longer be posed in terms of traditional aesthetics, but should consist (as stated by Kosuth in his famous 1969 essay) in a reflection on the nature of art, an exploration of the mechanisms of creation and an analysis of the linguistic signs within it. Photography, three-dimensional work and video, are the fruits already being produced by the new artistic venture of Eduardo Romo.
Antonio Espinoza
Art critic, Mexico City, April 2008
A Form in the Space of the Form of the Space of the Form in Space
¿Por qué irnos a donde no estamos?,
si donde estamos nace todo…
(Why should we go somewhere else?,
Everything is born where we are…)
Luis Ramaggio
Language always operates according to an emerging truth, even if that truth is false in the eyes of the obvious and the structure of reality. Reality can never claim its typical demand of verisimilitude, because neither poetic expression nor creative inspiration are satisfied in that way. The inner life, the urge for insight, and the cadence of the conceptual morpheme always prevail. But in the case of objectual taxonomy, the conceptualization of what we understand always tends to distract our aesthetic affections towards the superficial aspect of man and the conceptual value of "existing" things.
In the vertebrae of dimensionality, there are vectors and paths that are not highly evident, silent moments revealing cries of thirst to the eyes, which are unaware of their small presence. There is form inside the form.
In plastic discourse, the metaphor succumbs in view of the jealousy of space. In these two formal realities, horizontality and verticality mutate. What is in between?
Eduardo Romo generates a new language, whose conceptual structure greatly seeks to fracture the predictability of time, thus achieving a heroic act in the history of each object.
In his grammar of space, the sculptor works as if the discourse was in the nature of the material itself, not in its forced transformation. He sets out to give the material a little accent of truth, a reminder of its worth, in case the self-esteem of that body was put into question. Who does this artist speak to when evoking these memories? To the viewer? Or to the material itself?
The artwork by Eduardo Romo goes beyond his own intention. Upon entering the semantics of his rhythmic strokes, I realize that there is a primal tone that the artist hears: the pattern of silence.
His work does not enact the sublimation of space, but rather creates poetry with the mechanics of the circumstances and respects the integrity of the natural event by means of neat strokes.
It appears that in the neural syntax of Romo’s sculpture, truth is a factor that can be “undressed”. The anatomy of detail is presented in clear patterns of pure ideas, strongly questioned in fundamentalist rhetoric.
It would be easy to qualify the work of Eduardo Romo as a conciliation between art and design, perhaps denoting a shy use of space considering the potential of the material. But I disagree, because it is the voice of the material that solemnly demands to be respected and cautiously listened to. This seems as an act of reverence undertaken by this sculptor of ontologies whenever the wood speaks.
There is choral euphony in Romo’s sculptures; each incision is a value of absence, sparing the eyes from the need to look in order to remember that it is there, in the immensity of nothingness, where the nutrients of reality lie relentlessly.
Eduardo Romo confesses to his listener the secret of an architecture of sincerity, a symphony of submissive rhythms and endless twists of peace.
His sculpture reveals the impatience that lies in the oblivion of wood. Poetry in prose, geometry of causality.
Luis Ramaggio
Art critic, Mexico City, May 2003
Paramo organic production line
Devices is the artistic provocation Eduardo Romo, who has lived in May of the Cultural Center Atrium rooms, with a little organic silence revealed by light.
The object is a pretense that summarizes everything in the world. However, the choice is not random. Decant all categories of instruments and tools designed by man to reach the nut-screw binomial is a synthesis not only material but spiritual and conceptual.
The complementary duality of the phenomenal world, identified in two ordinary utensils of iron, place the aesthetic reflection from the industrial age, to return the noble soul of their interdependence with the matrix of mass reproduction, re-signifying the couple dialectic in which not only male-female physical opposites, but the poles are attached, are realized worlds are closed cycles are hemispheres.
The scale and matter are also speech. Objects like these are ordinary individuals of their functional intercourse and elevated to the bliss under one hat the Saints snapped away from the noise of things, and mechanical paraphernalia that makes them invisible in daily life. Romo is the device of functional substance and form. His nut gives another turn in the evolution of plastic, while the cellulose spiral screw pierces the space of consciousness, philosophical building bridges between ordinary and extraordinary. The apparent simplicity of the work is a Taoist exercise that, well assimilated, is enshrined in the viewer's experience as a spring to fire at all times be able to mean only the insignificant looking unique.
The meat looks like carved wood, malleable, finite. The dimension on the object in an exercise to reverse the common observation. Instead of approaching the subject the mysteries of the micro, small an aspirational fantasy of evolution through artistic sublimation, jump the barrier of the inorganic and resize it suffers on the human. Then their presence becomes an essence, involving space, impels the subject, filling the dark void with the brilliance of their holes, with the clarity of their channels.
A black flume room, an empty evidenced by the forms of two objects delicately beautiful, absurdly useless, however, contain the pace, efficiency, pragmatism resignified industrialization, a career break relentless construction of the world , an organic moor inertia through sterile.
Jose Manuel Ruiz de Regil
Writer and art critic, Mexico City, July 2010
Processes
Some people think that sight is free...
As if we were nothing, the things of the world come together in the human eye, seeking to create a mental ecology, a biology of thought, or simply subordinate to the form, sacred attribute of reality. In these times, in order to understand humanity it is necessary to understand things, because we are not formless.
An insignificant light appears in the human unconscious when we inevitably realize that reality holds us. Knowing that we are nothing but a changing fusion of other beings, other minds that are foreign, superior or inferior, drives us, reduces us to the process.
But also in understanding every process we can understand the thing and its being. Although we are experts in evocation, sublimators of meaning and adventurers of beauty, we are also things. When we look, we look at how we look, and we know that we are being looked at. I am going to look at those who read me:
Your gaze reads my gaze
Eduardo Romo has always been a decoder. In his works, we find a sensitive exploration of space and the phenomenon of the figure. However, I am not referring to the figure in the implied sense of the anthropomorphic or known form, but to the figure that is subject to the hard regime of physical space. He likes to emphasize time by means of accidents, blurring the formal notion of the corporeal through silence, the emptiness.
The process is a "reconstructive" exercise of all these principles. Eduardo Romo verifies the truth of the figure and its varying levels of eloquence by taking objects and things to planes that are more sublime, or less "real" (the planes of photography, sculpture, drawing, among others). As if performing an anatomical resignification, he uses the principles of rhetorical discourse to implement the signification processes that lead the object and the thing to become an absent, hidden or "unimportant" being to the human eye.
In his work, he always finds a way to overwhelm me in the swarm of reasoning; a new orbital logic takes possession of my senses when I look at his sculptural work. Now, in this essential (almost scientific) exploration of plastic truth and its mysteries, Romo dares to revise the work that shaped him. It would seem that he is now reversing the process of sculpture, to achieve a sincere truth (because not every truth is sincere), capable of generating “another” breath in the observer. That is, if the sculptor "re-presents", Romo is now making "un-sculpture" by presenting the truth of the represented object ...
Indeed, these swarms of parallel logics and open conceptual threads are the nutrients that lead the creator inward. And the inner exploration always causes an awakening. Romo is in search of a voiceless logic.
What for? Surely to transform these theoretical principles into tangible reality. To find, in the dimension of the everyday, a “shapeless” breath that brings us back -like religion or a broken promise- a drop of humanity, of clear, pure, aseptic observation of truth.
Luis Ramaggio
Art critic, Mexico City, August 2009
Transposition
Inspired by the interwar European modernism (Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Productivism), recent work by Eduardo Romo shows us his new aesthetic and conceptual pathways. Educated as a sculptor, Romo ventures into a new stage of his production through the territories of photography, visual art and Ready Made. He is now more interested in the ideal systems of logic and time-space relations, clearly influenced by artists such as Eduardo Chillida, Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi. In the same way, his visual exploration follows the path of the new objectivity, referring to artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto and Bernd and Hilla Becher, among others. Romo approaches conceptual art as stated by Kosuth: All art is conceptual because art only exists conceptually.
In his recent work, the artist goes to the bare essentials, eliminating elements that are excessive or that provide a structural outline, landing in the field of minimalism. I would not be surprised if these simplified works generated a short circuit in the receiver. In this new series of works, Romo succeeds in inserting non-artistic objects and contexts into the realm of art, with their corresponding change of function, in order to mark and challenge the idea of art as a set of specific object types, that is, he emphasizes Duchamp’s trend by elevating everyday objects to the status of art.
The works gathered here are also presented as objects of debate, inviting the viewer to dialogue in different ways; they reveal a certain tension between the formal and critical issues regarding the definition of art and artistic identity, as well as a general interest for cultural experimentation.
Juan Carlos Jaurena Ross
Director of the “Ex Teresa Arte Actual” Museum, Mexico City, August 2009
Present Spaces
There is emptiness that tastes like absence. Emptiness that bursts in the presence of an insistent glance. There is also emptiness that is so strong that it draws us to the depth of a mystery, in search of something that is unknown but continuously felt in the soul. Such emptiness is present in Eduardo Romo’s sculpture.
For the sculptor, architecture is the essential pretext that lets him explore the spaces that denote the presence of emptiness. With precise reasoning, he evokes emotions that are hidden in the organic lines of timber; strokes leaving tracks that invite the eye to travel through corridors and tunnels, which end in a well-pondered cross-section, thus confronting the possible existence of simultaneous constructions that do not need to be visible for their presence to be felt.
Sensible objects are, therefore, geometry and imagination. Lines that break, extend, stop and continue to spread, creating vacuous realities between spaces. Buildings that impact memory through sight.
After an arduous journey and a persistent exploration with different materials, Eduardo Romo has not only succeeded in creating architectural and abstract spaces, but that impetuous search has led him to plunge, little by little, in his own internal voids. That's where he reflects on those spaces that, although unoccupied, are existing, as the emptiness is the element that makes us feel the presence of our being and our world.
Rebeca Mingo
Writer and editor, Mexico City, August 2005
Works in Progress
Among the traditional art forms, sculpture is probably the one that underwent the most transformations (both formal and conceptual) throughout the twentieth century and still is being transformed to this day. The process of dehumanization of sculpture that began with modernism has been extremely fruitful and its effects remain to date. Thus sculpture, unlike painting, has adapted much better to the new aesthetic discourses, simultaneously moving through the forms dictated by these discourses. The collapse of the traditional barriers has allowed sculpture to explore and exploit new opportunities without sacrificing the essentials: its spatiality. This ability to adapt, far from being criticized, has been applauded, for it has opened new routes that were unthinkable a century ago.
Freedom from anthropomorphism allowed sculpture to travel through new multiple paths. The search for new forms became the primary task of sculptors. It is true that, throughout history, the work of these artists has been to give form to matter through specific procedures such as chiseling, modeling or carving. But it is also true that these traditional activities today have to coexist with other more innovative activities. There are many contemporary sculptors who are devoted to building artistic objects and many of them are drawn to architecture.
One of these sculptors is Eduardo Romo (Mexico City, 1966), who has worked diligently to build three-dimensional works of great forcefulness and strength. His father was an architect and, since the beginning of his career in the eighties, Romo set out to reflect on the sculptural space based on architectural concepts, to create works as if they were buildings or civil engineering constructions. In all his work (the young sculptor has handled various materials and has gone through several stages in his production), there is a rational configuration of space, which does not contradict the emotional and sensitive nature of his language.
In his eager search to create essential and definitive forms, Eduardo Romo has recently reached an ascetic abstraction. The sculptural works of his new production do not reproduce nor simulate any reality, but are erected with their own reality, with an intensity capable of producing the most varied visual impacts. They are authentic wooden constructions, organic works conceived under architectural concepts which, through their asceticism, intend to exalt the rational structure and expressiveness of the material in the discourse of contemporary sculpture. Today, as always, Eduardo Romo creates three-dimensional forms whose aesthetic presence unleashes poetry before our eyes.
Antonio Espinoza
Art critic, Mexico City, February 2004
The Subtle Force of Space
Abstract sculpture, perhaps more so than abstract painting, appeals especially to the interpretative motivation of the beholder. In painting, the figure is lost for the sake of pure reception. In sculpture, the form inevitably remains, and the more free the object, the more enigmatic it becomes. The abstract sculptor's hands must find a code that allows the material and volume to speak and thus create possible metaphors of meanings or feelings. Eduardo Romo does so through a subtle architecture in the sculptural space, highlighting the paths that the eye must travel to cover each piece, so that the eloquence of the material is expressed to the greatest extent possible. Eduardo avoids the mathematical coldness of sculpture based on pure geometry, but retains its most basic principles: horizon and vertigo. From purely organic sculpture, he reintroduces the respect for the natural qualities of the materials, but he manipulates them almost as if performing an invisible surgery. Thus, a beam ceases to be a beam, whether vertical or horizontal: the object becomes misleading; the eye wanders through the negative spaces, completes them, turns to the interior of the piece and appears at the other end as if it had crossed a tunnel, enjoying the gentle texture and discovering unexpected accidents. The light falls, creating shadows or gaps of varying intensities. The wood speaks through its marks, through its avatars, as evidenced by the intention of the sculptor, sometimes accentuated by the memory of fire, the signifying capacity of fire, which allows to create a poetic experience based on a series of carved wooden blocks. Sometimes the artist presents a contrast, perhaps a screw in the appropriate place to create tension, to ensure that the object-sculpture is questioned again, emphasizing its aesthetic presence and spatial mystery. Eduardo Romo in interested in this mystery of perception, and he intends to make the mystery evident through the sheer force of the sculptural space.
Gonzalo Vélez
Art critic, Mexico City, July 2001
Dialogues with Wood
The basic question: Why sculpture?
What can I say? These are simply choices. I don’t know if I made those choices or if this discipline chose me. I am telling you this: sculpture is what I do. When I was a kid, I already had the urge to create little things with materials, obviously not at a professional level, and then the years went by and I found myself doing the same thing. Suddenly I began to care more for the quality of the material, I bought plaster, I bought clay, and in the blink of an eye I realized that I was doing the same thing that when I was a child, but in larger formats, with a better concept, with better materials. And suddenly someone told me: master Eduardo Romo, sculptor Eduardo Romo, and I thought: Holy shit, I am a sculptor.
Why wood?
Because it is a living material; somehow it is a material that has texture and warmth. It is a testimony of time due to the development of the bark, cracks, crevices, accidents, seeds, fungus, moisture, all those sorts of things.
I realized that wood is a very noble material, which has unique qualities. I feel that it is a material with which there is a dialogue. In the case of stone, it imposes its characteristics and as a creator you also impose an idea, but wood is warmer because it's alive, in constant motion.
Eduardo comments on the importance of technique and concept in his artwork:
I care equally about both things. Recently, creators have cared more for their concept than their technique. With the rise of eclecticism beginning from the '70s, postmodernism, and freedom in terms of dialogue and technique, people have been more concerned about what the say than how they say it. To me, both are equally important: what I said and how I said it.
Cristina Olmlos / Ariane Díaz
Editors of “Neurona”, Mexico City, October 2002
Eduardo Romo and His Abstract Language
Sculpture is volume, space, relation between mass and void, subject, texture, sometimes color, water... However varied these and other elements may be, the sculptor works with a relatively limited variety of resources compared to other arts. In return, the objects have a quality of tangible reality, and inhabit the world of the other existing objects with a stronger, not illusory, presence.
Eduardo Romo prefers abstraction, which barely refers to the natural reality, only as a veiled suggestion. Before devoting his attention to wood, he had used other materials such as stone and artificial stone; the play of geometric forms was predominant, including references to certain pre-Hispanic sculpture solutions; he then worked on the opposition between geometry and accident. Now the wood takes more organic modes, where the sculptor's hand sometimes intervenes very discreetly, only to help the material express itself; at other times, there is subtle carving and polishing, and even treatment with fire or lacquer, or adding metallic elements, but everything is devised so that the wood may express -so to speak- its constituent qualities.
Jorge Alberto Manrique
Art critic, Mexico City, May 1994
Eduardo Romo’s Sculpture
The sculpture by Eduardo Romo is oriented towards abstract solutions that he uses to rigorously control the formal values of his plastic language. However, the result shown in his works is always true to reality, as his demand for order and classical mark lead to a dense and robust speech, deeply rooted in life, from which Romo absorbs the most genuine forces. His refined taste does not renounce the exquisiteness of the matter, whatever this may be, seen as the basis for new experiences.
In short, Romo's talent for structuring and synthesizing forms creates a sculpture that reflects the sense of time and opens the way to new fantastic solutions.
Berta Taracena
Art critic, Mexico City, May 1994
