Nicolás Romero (Buenos Aires, 1985) began twenty years ago signing Ever and doing graffiti in the streets of his hometown, a city that was living the hangover of a military dictatorship that had lasted eight years and that at that time understood street art as an expression of freedom.

Currently, Nicolás has been developing his studio work around the “Naturalezas Muertas”, with which through the union of elements he has found a way to use the image as a form of social reflection and anthropological research. He works through traces he finds in his immediate context, the result of the social fabric and symbols born of the coexistence of social, cultural and economic factors. From soft drink bottles to religious prints, political symbols, contemporary icons or something as seemingly innocent as fruits and vegetables are part of these compositions that he uses as a bridge to talk about more complex realities.

It is precisely this confluence between still lifes and that connection with his childhood and pushed by times in which society was modifying its behaviors in the face of a global pandemic, which leads him to give architectural form, specifically gundam, to these still lifes, giving life to beings dressed in standardized consumer elements – anonymous and global identities – through their bodies.

Romero has presented solo exhibitions at Ochi Projects Gallery (Los Angeles), The Diogenes Club (Los Angeles), Galeria Varsi (Rome), Galería Libertad (Querétaro) and Dinámica Gallery (Buenos Aires). He has participated in group shows at Studiocromie (Italy), Marian Cramer Projects (Amsterdam), Fir Gallery (Beijing),  Cerquone Gallery (Madrid), and in other countries such as France, South Africa, Austria, Australia, Mexico and the United States.

Recently Romero Escalada had a show with Ting Ting art space in Taiwan and recently was presented at Swab Barcelona and in the same week as Paris he will be participating in art Taipei.

He has done illustrations for the printed versions of New York Times Magazine and ZEIT Magazine.

His work has been selected in cultural institutions such as the Santander Foundation, Amalita Fortabat Museum and Palais de Glace, all three in Buenos Aires, the Macro Museum in the city of Rosario or the Biennial of urban interventions in the CCEC and the Caraffa Museum in Cordoba, Argentina.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am particularly interested in the symbolic mechanisms embedded in everyday consumer objects. Through this work, which serves as both an archive and a document, I aim to reveal the different layers of emotional resonance that shape the material goods surrounding me. Rooted in a fascination with iconography and the power of images, this exploration is deeply connected to my migrant condition and my territorial relationships. In navigating the distance that exile imposes, I seek to create a friendly context by forming bonds with the small, the familiar, and the immediate. My practice is scaffolded by memory, with my body acting as the nexus where these experiences converge. Within me, threads of childhood, cultural colonialism, youthful decisions, and family values are interwoven. My biography does not emerge in isolation; it is a residual trace of all the days I have lived.

As someone who grew up during the boom of globalization, I cannot deny that sentimental capitalist education is part of my worldview. To pretend otherwise would be naïve. In this context, manga and anime culture hold a particular significance, representing a period in my life when I first began to reflect on reality—adulthood as an artifact that dismantles illusions. Argentina in the 1990s rehearsed a kind of first-world identity in terms of cultural and material consumption, a façade that proved devastating given the country’s actual conditions. The contradiction of enjoying a comic or movie with childlike innocence while living in a nation shipwrecked by neoliberalism became a critical counterpoint, shaping my understanding of the geopolitical landscape and my own situated subjectivity.

In my performative engagement with the everyday, I assign symbolic value to objects that might otherwise seem devoid of meaning. This distorts my aesthetic perception, as the act of consumption itself begins to intertwine with the body of work. Every material object holds within it the potential to connect to the sprawling “Frankenstein” of memory. In my recent painting, I recognize the presence of non-linear temporality. By this, I mean that stimuli or cultural productions from my childhood’s entertainment and spectacle are often embedded in my memories, stuck there like tar, waiting to resurface. By instrumentalizing nostalgia, I bring these fragments into the present, creating a crossover between past impressions and the contemporary world around me.

For these reasons, I see objects as being saturated with emotion, even when they appear inert or lifeless. The mechanisms of subjectivation and meaning-making have the power to imbue vitality even in representations of death. Ultimately, this is what the act of creation is: a platform of energy and intuition through which we glimpse the universe.