Antonio Romoleroux: the heartbeat of opposites
Sonia Kraemer, Ph.D.
Quito, 2024

Antonio Romoleroux (Quito, 1968) has forged a heterogeneous and multifaceted career that places him as one of the most prominent artists on the Ecuadorian scene and, at the same time, has managed to leave a mark on the international scene. His work is distinguished by its constant search for technical innovation and exploration of complex issues, as well as by its commitment to the ecosystem, resilience and human rights.

A nomad of aesthetics, he is recognized for his ability to move through and through various stylistic currents, from abstraction to photorealism, creating an artistic corpus that transcends conventional categories and reflects his concern to understand the multiple aspects of the human and the universe that surrounds us. In thematic terms, Romoleroux has explored a wide territory that ranges from the darkness of human helplessness and torment to the interpretation of nature and the ancestral collective identity of myth.

Particularly noteworthy is his connection with the spiritual world of the Amazon, where symbols and signs are intertwined with animal spirits and nature: abbreviated forms are suggested to discover the jaguar, the anaconda, the butterfly, the snake or the frog. Through his work, Romoleroux seeks to reconnect with that world lost in oblivion to understand the Amazonian semiotic ecosystem, a leitmotiv that reflects his paroxysm for the jungle and its mysteries. From the dreamlike journeys of the shaman and the coexistence of fauna in the cosmic order, the human being can reintegrate himself, where the linear and measurable world of the West breaks down to enter into otherness.

Amazonian philosophy is based on the interrelation of the whole, where the individual is part of a network of natural and universal relationships. A principle of correspondence between the macrosomic and the microcosmic is recognized. The gods are immanent, they live among us, and life is understood as the flow of energy that manifests itself through complementary opposites. Knowledge is a collective wisdom transmitted orally and through rituals, such as ayahuasca or yagé, and is the result of a transsensitive experience. The central concept reflects a deep and experiential understanding of nature that prefigures ideas about space-time similar to the conceptual understanding of quantum physics.

Contrary to the postmodern tendency that the artist must become a philosopher or a mere producer of the concept of the work without getting involved in the artisanal process of the same, Romoleroux walks against the current when he works from the origin of the materials, knowing the basic and original process of the same. For example, his development of the technique of handmade paper with abaca fibers (Musa textiles) as a base for inserting the etching on copper is a political statement, more than a matter of taste or material choice. Opposites coexist: paper and metal, hard and soft, city and jungle, fragility and hardness.

Antonio Romoleroux has a profuse artistic practice in his long career, which is evident in his hundreds of individual and collective exhibitions. He has won numerous awards for his artistic and human quality and has also developed curatorships and conferences. Today I could say that he is a paradigm in the path of creation to discover and develop permanently without giving in to passing fashions, incessantly seeking his own and authentic language. The challenge of this artist is to build a trench of resistance against globalization and the irremediable massification of culture, and he has developed his vocation in the dedication to transcend the limitations of any kind in its most stereotypical forms, such as machismo or nationalism.

Art attempts to provide answers, it represents the artist’s Self as well as the Non-Self, that is, the Universe that surrounds him, and it is precisely the work of art that possesses a cathartic force and the link that connects the artist with the other: the spectator. Antonio Romoleroux has that rare ability to approach the threshold where the truth plays at hiding and through his perception he helps us to get closer to the essence of everything. Art thus becomes a way through which human beings can delve into the origin of all things, revealing the underlying truth as a path to self-knowledge.

Exhibition: “The message of the models to humanity”
Kunstraum artescena, Leipzig, Germany
Nuria Silvestre
November 19, 2021
I know that we are transgressing international and physical borders. I am happy to be able to share these brief, but intense moments, with you and above all enjoy the Artist’s creations that I hope will reach many, wherever it may be.
As a politician and activist in favor of human rights and nature, I celebrate being able to enjoy art as a means to create social awareness. Through it you are sensitized, your soul is touched, you are moved and you reflect and delve into other spheres. Perhaps at first unimaginable for the observer, but surely very important, especially on this topic.
“What is your message to humanity?” What a transcendental question, so intimate and personal. You, Mr. Romoleroux, show us a great variety of bodies that become inevitably beautiful. The impulses of the models through their words, their smiles, unlikely postures, their handwriting, their looks, make us reflect on the magnitude of existence, of humanity.
I would highlight the relationship that I sense between author and protagonists. What and how much has been the connection between artist and models, the “good treatment”, the respect, providing a safe space, to achieve this openness? First of all, towards themselves, towards their own desires and their own will, in my opinion, in a profoundly free way. Extraordinary self-acceptance, which demonstrates in a radically new way, the self-love and control they have of their lives, without shame and with great courage. What wonderful messages. All. Examples? The image of Luna with menstruation, breaking taboos and stigmas. The powerful Judith with her fist raised. That nameless face, a half smile, a heartbreaking story of overcoming, of resilience. Demonstrating the survival capacity of women and how necessary it is to give voice to these experiences, thus overcoming taboos and fears, calling for solidarity.
Because bell hooks said, “being oppressed means the absence of options.” That is why these images of freedom are immensely empowering, they give strength and hope. Hope for change towards the end of patriarchy, towards the end of the oppression that we experience at all levels.
Today more than ever we breathe the air of change. Feminist movements are drivers of social changes, of important legal, educational, and artistic changes in this case. All fair and necessary. Can you now imagine our world without the feminist movement?
“Not one less”? Did those Argentine women imagine in 2015 the magnitude of the expansion of their energy? Its strength has reached millions of women around the planet. In Leipzig we have supported the movement by demonstrating, there have been audiovisual and photographic representations, etc. Other global movements such as “Fridays for Future” are beginning to be interdisciplinary, involving the gender perspective, racism, discrimination… it is very necessary for this to be the case.
Martin Luther King said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable web of reciprocity, bound in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
That is why it is so important that we cooperate, that we are supportive, that we seek that understanding of the strange and unknown, through respect and understanding that it is a process, in many cases “for life.”
It’s been more than a decade since I arrived in this city, thanks to a joint publication we met Helena. We spoke in German and tried to work on our “migratory grief” in a group of special women. Looking back, I realize the support network that we sought from the beginning, the importance of positive examples, the resources that we add as a female community in the diaspora, and of course, the strength that unity and representation provide.
I can only thank you, Mr. Romoleroux, for the visibility that you have given to the female perspective in his work. I wish you much success and admirers who share this feminist spirit, which desires nothing more than equality and social justice.

Anthology exhibition, PUCE Cultural Center 2018
Hernán Pacurucu C.
Art critic and curator
ANTONIO ROMOLEROUX
The complexity of an artist
“The complexity of thought, as well as the reconstruction of reality by the knowing subject, necessarily leads us to transdisciplinarity as a research method and as an epistemology of research and knowledge, which helps us penetrate into the knowledge of life, existence, knowledge, human development, education and the disciplines in which scientific knowledge has been compartmentalized. In the increasingly complex society, its antagonisms, disorders and conflicts necessarily entail a bond of spontaneous and voluntary fraternity. There is no other guarantee against the fragility of complexity than the permanent self-regeneration of complexity itself. That is to say, if we want to be free, we have to bear the risks of freedom.”
José Manuel Juárez/ Sonia Comboni Salinas
“when we talk about complexity «… It is about facing the difficulty of thinking and living»”.
Edgar Morin
What has not been said about his work
It seems that everything has been said from a critical perspective about the work of Antonio Romoleroux; However, it also seems that the most obvious thing has been ignored, that holistic approach that allows the artist to navigate between dissimilar waters without his epistemic project shipwrecking in said attempt.
The plurality with which in principle his work would be caressed does not obey the world of variety, rather it obeys the intricate “complex essence” in which the artist formulates his aesthetic project.
Some time ago, the young Romoleroux, a prodigy artist – one of those that the famous art critic Arthur Danto says is no longer in the making – and who at 26 years old already managed to obtain the “Mariano Aguilera” First Prize for Painting; and already having multiple awards at his young age, he created a devastating need to seek new directions once success consolidated him in his most admired formats, such as those of the series My essence in your senses that precedes the Award, and which consolidates him as a renowned artist, works such as Sacred Tree (1995), Natem (1994), Own Dreams (1995), Don’t Give Up (1996), Use of Magic 81995), Mango (1999), Fértil (1999 ), Liquid (1999), Today (1999), Curare (2000), EN (2000), Wet Forest (2005), Fourth Path (2005), You are sacred (2005), Bioindicators (2006), Antonia (2006) , His soul lives in the light (2006), among others and which culminates in the great pictorial sculpture My essence in your senses, (2007) an installation that summarizes all the archeology of this series. They will remain in the historical memory and the sharp retina not only of a specialized critic, but they will keep fortune in the memory archives of an entire country.
This series whose conceptual core is fed by the fragility with which paper – created by hand – replaces that breakable nature while copper multiplies the strength of an overwhelming city; However, the paper (nature) maintains that onslaught of a city that corrodes it even when it cannot sustain itself without it: an excellent metaphor for life without life.
Resignification of the complex
The arbitrariness of the epidermal, courted by the unusual sense, would advocate for a perennial Romoleroux embedded in the masochistic self-satisfaction typical of the accumulation of awards, in what modernist criticism would consign as an author’s style, even more so the spirit of the artist rooted in the rebellious sense of it will never allow itself to precede itself, establishing the intent of a copy of the copy of the copy.
Quite the contrary, Antonio Romoleroux emerges as a dissonant figure in his own production, nourished by that holistic view that allows us to value the complexity of thought, to understand that his work is not possible only from a single view, but from understanding that tangled fabric that is intertwines and configures a whole diverse system of works, self-portraits, sketches, series, photographs confined with thoughts, criticisms, complaints, apogees, peaks and outcroppings of a future of the artist that allow us to know that Romoleroux is not just a technique, it is not only a style, nor is it a theme, but rather a set, sometimes neo-baroque, of that combination of all of this. In short, to understand the artist and his work, one must understand him in all the fullness of the complex, and the complex understood not as something complicated, difficult or tangled, but rather as that understanding of the world as an entity in which everything is interwoven, the complexus, that is, what is woven together.
And it is that: “what is woven together” gives the sense of individuality (individual = what cannot be divided) to the character in his own complex worldview, only in this way can we understand that both Systemic Identities – one of his earliest series – does not compete with Spiritual Amazonia, – a set of oil paintings, engravings and sculptures – or that the I consent is not a testimonial photographic whim that narrates the adversities they experienced, as well as the overcoming and how they became stronger from it.
emerges from the whim of the engraver-painter. Likewise, the message of the models to Humanity cannot be understood without understanding the systemic thinking that imagines the instability of nature itself in the reconstruction of our relationships with it, so the philosophical-cosmovisual configuration of the artist’s holistic thinking decants in a unique plastic proposal that reformulates the history of art in a kind of extensive range of dissimilar “understanding of the world” that has to do with the complexity of life and its relationship with this given world.
Aesthetic nomadism as contemporary behavior
So Antonio’s future is constituted by those comings and goings that quantify the complexity of his being, but define him as an insatiable contemporary who, like Gabriel Orozco, Koons or any contemporary visionary, does not allow his aesthetics to be pigeonholed into a product. , which can be taken to the infinite designs of marketing and of course the market.
In this sense, this escape becomes an efficient nomadism in that it rejects the narrowness of aesthetic methodologies and all the historical apparatus that attempts to measure the work of art, in its most inquisitive desire (art criticism and curatorship) to slip between the interstices of the style, beauty and technique to make us understand that we have a turbulent artist, impossible to be classified in any section in the box of history and that his object of study lasts a long time, understanding that today at fifty years old he does not exist. investigative methodology or instrument of witchcraft that allows us to know the processes of change that will anticipate their new ways of looking at art.
The portraits of him, a world apart
The author’s captivating log highlights the complex and isolated world of his portraits, such as Self-portrait (1988), Self-portrait egocentrism (1990), Self-portrait schizophrenia (1990), Self-portrait (2012), among others.
The same ones that testify in the freshest way to the satirical world in which the individual unfolds, once again giving the unavoidable clues and leaving in the thick forest that trail of crumbs that allows us to follow the psychological trail within that changing cosmos in which it seems that establishes his “world system” so unmistakably Romoleroux.

Exhibition: “Das Bewußte Ich” by Antonio Romoleroux
Embassy of Ecuador in Berlin, Germany
Helena García Moreno
Berlin, September 16, 2015
Antonio Romoleroux’s proposal on resilience is a contribution to contemporary art, exposed to the public since 2013. For this reason, his aesthetic contribution through resilience goes beyond the local confines of Ecuadorian, South American and continental territory towards the universal. . But what is meant by resilience in combination with the human being? The notion of “resilience” is currently spreading with enormous scope in regard to cities and towns that have overcome extremely complex difficulties. Resilience is that physical quality that makes certain bodies subjected to great pressure, nevertheless, able to keep their original structure intact once the squeeze or abuse disappears. In the same way, there are certain people who, without being aware of it and thanks to that internal mechanism present in all human beings, have managed to improve themselves. This means that, at critical moments in their lives, they have managed to survive. Additionally, there are certain personal characteristics of survival, among them hope, that emerge at the right moment. Especially when there was someone next to the traumatized person to encourage them. And in this context, Romoleroux’s work is pertinent. Thus, resilience emerges as a psycho-emotional phenomenon, when a person is lucky enough to have external support. A person or group located physically and emotionally outside the conflict or harmful environment causing suffering. This support would consist of a kind of reference or secure attachment, if it were a child (in which case the responsibility should fall on the State as an entity obliged to guarantee the integrity of the minor and ensure their inalienable rights) or an adult. who inspires and contributes ideas to another to help her overcome adversity.
This is how people get ahead, when they cannot count on the support of their nuclear family, because either they have lost it or because, having one, they have had to flee from it to preserve their physical, mental and emotional integrity. (just to name a few circumstances of the human condition and its dysfunctions). Furthermore, this list could include all the vicissitudes of various kinds that human beings could eventually suffer during our existence.
However, avoiding suffering is mostly possible. For example, when we stop feeding the belief of failure. A concept that is usually imposed both in our immediate environment and that can eventually be extended to the social or professional sphere. The fear of failure can be due to an individual or collective subconscious compulsion, deeply rooted in culture, for wanting to appear something that one is not in front of others. Being a kind of concealment of what one is, in order to evade the feeling of shame that causes us to face certain aspects of our personality or condition, considered unacceptable within social norms. This refers to what Carl Gustav Jung would call “the shadow, with which the person could work to consciously integrate their shadow. In this way, the fear of failure is expressed by constantly trying to fit into an idealized model or imposed by a social environment, whether family or an extended community with rigid belief schemes. The reality is that the fear of failure hides a feeling of inferiority or any type of childhood wound and makes us people obsessed with controlling and regulating the lives of others, in a phenomenon that in psychology is called “projection.” Thus evading our responsibility and commitment that, above all, we should have with ourselves to be happy and at peace. Accepting our essence unconditionally and letting other people be as they can and want to be, without judging them.
On the other hand, a person who is capable of transmitting serenity and guiding can illuminate and change the life of another for the better. In this sense, today there are support groups all over the world with extensive professional experience in the field of psychology, whose purpose is to accompany and sustain resilience processes.
The resilient and positive attitude lies, above all, in believing in the individual’s internal faculties to make use of them, in order to recover self-love, connect with their creativity and with gratitude towards life, despite everything. This new posture towards life gives the person autonomy. In addition to developing his empathy and solidarity, it also allows him to live with ethics and enthusiasm.
But when does the conscious being emerge? Resilience is a gradual process of comprehensive healing that, in addition to restoring the individual’s well-being and psychological balance, makes him aware of his own valuable existence. Through self-inquiry, the person allows themselves to leave conscience (reason), that system of moral thought rooted in culture that is based on good and evil and that, therefore, judges instead of understanding in depth. Therefore, once someone begins the path of awakening, he leaves behind erroneous beliefs and conquers his own power. He has even escaped from that cultural corset under the famous phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre: “Each man is what he does with what was made of him.”
Being conscious, therefore, goes beyond the matrix thoughts of Western culture, in a transcultural exercise and in a transpersonal praxis to rethink not only the meaning of existence, but the ability to return to an internal state of harmony. and fulfillment through meditation practices and positive psychology. In such a way that the person expands the notion of consciousness, recognizing the greatness of his being, the sense of deservingness, of being loved and valued for the simple fact of existing, like every living being. This is where the notion of consciousness emerges and the importance of the exhibition “The Conscious Self” by Antonio Romoleroux.

Exhibition: “The Self is Spirit”, by the Ecuadorian artist Antonio Romoleroux.
Santiago de Chile, April 28, 2009
Juan Antonio Bolumburu
There is no doubt that the exhibition that we are inaugurating constitutes a relevant sample due to the extraordinary quality of the artist, winner of various awards and recognitions.
Antonio Romoleroux, has arrived at our Institute with as a letter of introduction one of the best reviews in his country and where he has exhibited outside of it.
At 41 years old, he is considered among the most successful artists in Ecuador and this pictorial exhibition reflects it.
It is pointed out that his proposal largely seeks to open the debate around the balanced relationship that must exist between man and nature.
In his works, painted in acrylic on handmade Abacá paper, cast with copper etching and aquatint, there is an evident ancestral, almost shamanic sense, linked to the Amazon.
This sample of such unique characteristics, of a style that bears the seal of its author, has been possible to present in Chile thanks to the Embassy of Ecuador, the personal management of its ambassador, whom we publicly thank and through him the Government of his nation.
We give special emphasis in our thanks to Ecuador not only for the friendship that unites the Institute with this nation, but also because we have been distinguished with this exhibition.
My thanks also to Mr. mayor for his presence at this ceremony, to the ambassadors present, for having the kindness to accompany us on such a special opportunity.

Book: “Antonio Romoleroux”, 2007
The work of Antonio Romoleroux
Dr. Inés M Flores
Time and at the same time the idea of timelessness, which concern certain contemporary currents of thought, are in some way behind the work of Antonio Romoleroux, developed between drawing, painting, engraving, assembly and casting of copper with handmade paper…
After overcoming the first figurative stage inscribed in surrealism and hyperrealism, he began to stylize, until he conquered the current abstract and vigorous freedom. He faces a passion for the problem of space, going from wide voids to surfaces variegated with signs, often divided into geometric quarters that house strokes and ideograms in relief. It happens that the artist has been interested in the traces of aboriginal cultures, in the form of symbols and signs, especially from the Amazon. Previously, Romoleroux had generated his own sign lines, purely for aesthetic purposes. This further led him to the investigation of ancestral semiotics, which he now finds priority in his works.
In his work there is a relationship with the metaphorical and the allegorical; not as a story, but as fragmentary but coherent data, which offer us clues for reflection on existences that seem exotic to the common viewer. The signs and symbols he uses represent animals, birds, insects of the jungle, and perhaps say things that beyond the environment to which they belong it is not even possible to imagine.
Regarding the technique that this artist currently uses, we must highlight, on the one hand, his dedicated work with acids on metal and, on the other hand, the manual production of paper and its multiple processes, which continue, chained, until reaching its final form, with unique material conditions. He channeled his creation into new forms, committed to graphic techniques, hand in hand with the most elaborate artisanal procedures, until achieving splendid textures or stupendous luminosities, thanks to the virtuous fusion of handmade paper and copper. This, linked to the meanings of the Amazonian world, where there are residues and testimonies of ancient experiences, traces of lost forms, which place the image and the object in circumstances absolutely foreign to our world. In any case, as in magical corners, the plant fibers and metal extracted from the bowels of the earth, when united, end up in a work of art.
Of course, the sign does not reach here the real representation of its contents, but it is articulated with the traditions of the ethnic groups that use them, and in whose life magic is an important factor. Romoleroux adopts this kind of ancestral writing, to load it with his own thoughts, so that it serves to express his personal attitude as an artist. He works in his workshop, drawing, making paper and combining it with copper to obtain a support on which he engraves his mysterious messages. It seems that his hand is guided, unconsciously, by the spirits of the jungle, whose inaudible voices try, perhaps, to warn us about the dangers of the destruction of the primitive forest. But we are left only with the admiration that the artist’s strokes and the original technique he uses produce in us.
Romoleroux’s work reveals great talent, as well as an obsessive dedication to a work that he has been building since his earliest youth, going through different stages and in a tireless process of solitary research, which has allowed him to reach the high levels that he now records his artistic production. An original, consistent and admirable production, which cannot be compared with anything we know. That is why it is possible to decide that Romoleroux, with his recent work, is unique and as such occupies a prominent position in the concert of national art.

Antonio Romoleroux
New Critical Dictionary of visual artists of Ecuador of the 20th century, 2006
Hernán Rodríguez Castelo
One of the most interesting figures of the new Ecuadorian engraving.
At first, a tendency towards a neo-expressionist drawing of social criticism and denunciation.
Very good management of techniques. IN the XXXI October Salon – dedicated to graphic arts – he presents a magnificent serigraph: head in sienna and background in ocher.
The engraving that earned him one of the four mentions in the National Competition (1990) – Letrina’s – showed that a leap had been made: it was a silkscreen print rich in expressive values, boldly new in its semiotic concept: broken forms, immersed in a chaos of color, with penetrating allusions to graphic advertising messages or those of the mass media.
His sculpture from the National Competition (1990) – welded and painted iron – was a mobile: an astrolabe with four concentric metal circles, with the ability to rotate. Historical and cultural recovery at the same time as an invitation to play.
They showed where their searches were guided by the works with which they attended the Hall of the Municipality of Quito in 1993. In Origin and Eternity, one like a blue stone, with a drawing highlighted in a white line; strokes with some sign organized in rows; in the center and below, two whistle snails, drawn with meticulousness. You could see craftsmanship and idea; All of this needed to come together into a visually solid whole. In the other piece, The Chance of Virtue, on a surface textured with strokes – in ochres. A green grid, with the central line of a serpentine shape and four eyes, alluding to esoteric searches.
Support was privileged in their searches. Women of the Soul – by Mariano Aguilera 94 – showed vigorous craftsmanship of the support, whose textures contributed to the strength of images of brutal neo-expressionism. And new expressive possibilities were attempted: in Origin of Life they were pasted submerged in paint. But at the same time he delved into old cultures – especially the Amazonian ones – to enrich his own expression with signs and symbols rich in meaning.
And the sculptor began to add metal to those two-dimensional pieces. He then won the important Mariano Aguilera prize (1995) with a work that integrated handmade paper with a copper plate rich in etching lines. The simple metallic form, a sort of elemental totem: itself symbolic and pregnant with symbolic drawings. It was a novel work due to materials and workmanship – more so because of workmanship; rich with hermetic senses, and severe beauty.
The artist had settled comfortably into a technique, style and poetics. He displayed them in a remarkable individual (Art-Forvm, 1996). A plastic expression that begins with the elaboration of the support: handmade paper, thick in material and rich in textures given by that same material. On such a rich surface, cast copper plates to which the acid has given color and the etching incision have enriched them with sign and symbolic writings. And also on the paper, traces collected from old Indian cultures are etched. And the artist, anxious to multiply these semiotic fusions of human extremes, had incorporated laser prints into such works, which significantly reproduced jungle warriors in primitive and naive nudity. He wanted to establish a relationship in the tense unity of the work of art, the most primitive with the most advanced science and technology. And all this semiotic game came together in a form rich in meanings: the tree.
In this great effort to bring distant and apparently conflicting cultural spaces into a tense relationship, as a means – in his own words – of making man live with man, the artist, while continuing to delve into the knowledge of old cultures, to extract from them wisdom that was based on signs and symbols, extended his experimentation on media and instruments to advanced photographic processes and computer work and exposed the iconic manipulation of advertising and marketing. And he ventured into three-dimensional space with installations that combined a motion detector and Amazonian music with the richness of the handmade paper and the penetrating form rooted in old Amazonian cultures.