Matias Romano

Lives and works in Porto, Portugal

Artist statement

As a literature, chess and music enthusiast I started to inhabitate the fragile limit of painting, drawing and sculpture. I explore the idea of memory as a space, as an existential and rhetoric zone. Pushing my own thought and objects to its margins, I try to develop exhausting spaces that mainly consist in a slight dislocation of memory and fiction, embracing literature as another part of my raw materials. The result, sometimes, would look as a darkened abyss creating magnetism towards the complete reclusion of image. Sometimes, just a work titled after a song. Not that long ago an image emerged from the black pond of my foggy mind. There was this painting from three or four years ago, hanging on my studio wall besides a floating plant. The image is grey, monochromatic; a woman shaped black shadow carries a wounded body across the field. After that rediscovery I focused on an extensive production of works in different formats and mediums. In my mind, this last production is my way of writing the fiction that all my life I wanted to be able to write, re-writing memories, fantasising with them. Lauren Berlant in her book called “Cruel Optimism” says fantasy is not a plan, it is not something that comes to balance the way you live. (...) It is the very action of living, his way of spending time without trying to become something within the framework of a system of exploitation and exchange. Without trying she express, so, effortlessly, the production enfolds and reveal...

Artwork