Other

Daniel Romano
Statement
I am challenged by the conflictive nuclei of interpersonal relationships. I understand the artist's work as a challenge to push the boundaries of the
established, to wonder about what is not observable at first glance and to poetically embrace the edges of what separates us as individuals.

In OTRO –as in my previous works- I go on seeking to stage conflict systems, to bring unresolved situations closer to allow second thoughts.

I found myself with the challenge of rethinking (myself) about others, who I am not and, therefore, revisiting my own place of belonging. This work
led me to approach the possibility of coming together with others using artistic methodology as a map and as a strategy.

Daniel Romano
2021
Other

Work in progress

https://danielromano.net/pagina-nueva-52
Other
Skin is everything. Intimacy is a lifeline.

Surely this has happened to you. You are in a public place, in a city that is not your own, and somehow you start a conversation with an unknown
person. Being on a trip implies a certain permeability to the new, barriers that go up and a willingness to the unknown tailored to one's curiosity.
Without realizing it, your conversation enters more and more personal terrain and, suddenly, you hear yourself telling things you would never have
dared to tell anyone.
They say that opening up to strangers is much easier to do than with people we know - even our partners or lifelong friends. Intimacy is undoubtedly
a strange phenomenon, elusive to concepts that pretend to define it once and for all, and yet it is one of the few things we have all experienced at
some point.
Intimacy has a birth date and, I risk, also an expiration date. Its appearance in our History of Subjectivity was not at all organized, it was not even
something constructed by a calm, intelligent will in use of all its faculties. Intimacy appeared as a lifeline. Literally.

If we were to look for the origins of something resembling the experience of intimacy as we know it today, we would have to travel to the crisis in
Europe between the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Age. It was a time of brutal uncertainties, perhaps the greatest in our History -until
today? -, a product of the exponential demographic growth, the appearance of the city and the growing concentration of people in it, and the
increasingly evident fragility of what was considered the sovereign power. A situation of such chaos and uncertainty that left everyone to their own
devices. "Perhaps -says researcher Fernando Peirone- the only possible way out of this socio-cultural reconfiguration was the creation of intimacy,
as an instance of personal protection and preservation. This remarkable device - possibly only comparable to the 'conscience' that allowed the
human species to elaborate its own vulnerability in the face of death - functioned as a quasi-Darwinian adaptation resource".

If we agree that intimacy is a lifeline of Humanity in times of uncertainty, we still need to understand what it is, when it appears and to what territories
it would give us access. These are the questions that motivated multidisciplinary artist Daniel Romano to embark on a visual and conceptual
research project on the phenomenon of what "the others" produce within our identity. He organized a procedure for the collection of testimonies that,
not for being ambitious, lost its share of love and care: it was a call to people -most of them unknown- to be portrayed on video while he would do a
brief interview with them. All those who showed up knew, from the beginning, that the filming would involve their skins, their own naked bodies.
This field of research is not new for the artist, although the way of acting artistically is. In his previous works, Daniel has been exploring the themes
of human relationships. More specifically, interpersonal, sentimental, romantic relationships: those that are proper to desire.


2
This itinerary began with a series of photographs and subsequent book entitled PAR (2014). There, relationships were seen from the outside - the
artist captured "couples" linked by some merely visual motif - in the construction of an urban catalog of linkages; in the paintings that followed, titled
HUNT (2017/18), that optimism became the perception of an imminent threat: every hunter is in turn a prey. He was still talking about love, but this
time with a more bitter taste and a greater risk. It was after a trip to China that his vision of bonds seems to have changed: there, the others were
indeed resounding "Others". Different not only from the superficial, such as facial features or the incomprehensible language, but also in their
customs, in the way they moved in the street, in the way they approached each other and the almost invisible perimeter of personal space. From
that journey emerged the exhibition OTRO (2017) where the artist combined a very long photograph (273 cms. wide) of an entire Chinese village
with a video in which a figure rotated on its axis and kept changing its face showing people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. "I found myself
challenged to rethink(me) in others, in those who are not me and, therefore, to revisit my own place of belonging."

Now in this reloaded version of OTHER (2020), which we can appreciate at the Wunsch Gallery, Daniel takes his research even a bit deeper. The
question of interpersonal relationships is still at the heart of his aesthetic concerns but he goes a step beyond the duo, desire or strangeness. He
found an element that is absolutely private to each person and yet universal. It is about exposing the theater of intimacy, nudity and knowing what it
is that makes us perceive ourselves as genuinely us. 
As we saw above, intimacy was born as a shelter and personal preservation and it is precisely in this treasured landscape -sometimes desert-like
and other times populated like a jungle- that the artist enters. He does so by asking the right questions and thus setting up a conversational alibi
while he asks his interviewees to undress, little by little and in front of the camera. "What is intimacy for you? -The question is not heard, but it can
be sensed in the answers we hear in the video: "Do you realize when you are really you or when you are trying to be someone for the other? Is
there something that forces you not to be? What limits do the others put on you so that you can be you? The skin served the artist as a metonymic
element -the part for the whole- to talk about that space where everything happens. The skin "is the hair standing on end -one of his interviewees
answers- the sensations, the impulses, love, anger, madness, sex, death, fear, the skin is everything, the skin is... yes, it is everything". 

OTRO is deployed in multiple visual platforms because only in this way it is able to account for and represent the inalienable diversity that makes up
the intimate. In one of the videos we see naked people appear, rotate, the group unfolding in a sort of floating round on a black background; in
another, a conversation begins and before it ends another is added, and then another, and so it goes on, while we observe the relative relaxation or
the frank discomfort of these strangers undressing and reflecting on the limits and scope of their own intimacy. The blackness of those backgrounds
on which the figures are shown makes us think less of the visual semiotics of a Bil Viola than of the non-space and non-place of Liliana Porter's
hyper-conceptual compositions. The exhibition is completed by a series of drawings and paintings in close reference to the videos.
3
Drawings of groups gathered as they never did in reality, represented by lines that barely show the silhouette and that at times seem to touch, rub
against each other, lean on each other, look into each other's eyes: to bond. The marks of the brush and the discharge of the material on the
support is the living flesh of the paintings where the group appears tighter than in the other formats, close to each other and in full action. In all
cases, the artist manipulated the exhibition of those bodies; he used them as available matter for the construction of a sign that captivates us, that
invites us to rethink ourselves -how would I have acted in that situation? what is intimacy for me?- and to consider the possibility of opening
ourselves to others, just as we see that this group of strangers did.

Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias

Curator

Nuñez, spring 2020

Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias (Buenos Aires, 1982)

She received her BA in Arts at the University of Buenos Aires. In 2016 she was chosen as the only Argentine to travel to Kiev, Warsaw and Prague in the curatorial research program CPR:
2016 - Eastern Europe. In 2013 she was selected and awarded a scholarship in the Artists Program of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, to participate as a critic/curator. She is summoned
as a juror for awards that encourage local production and its development, such as: Premio Itaú Artes Visuales (2017); C.Lab #4 - Mercosur (San Pablo, curatorial award); Jury for the
selection of galleries for FACA (2017); Oxenford Scholarships (2016).
She has been working in curatorial practice since 2006, starting with Las Ciudades Inservibles at Appetite Gallery. She ventures into non-traditional formats, for example, with the realization
of an exhibition Crack-up (2015) developed in 25 minutes long, in video format. She was the curator at MACBA of Interacciones fundamentales de un cielo estrellado (2016) with works by
Silvia Gurfein, Julia Masvernat and Carla Bertone. Together with Florencia Battiti they curated the first edition of arteBA Focus Galerías (2016), the first experience of this contemporary art
fair that privileged the works, rather than the stand grid.
During 2011, together with Pía Landro, they designed the Educational Curatorship program for the Faena Arts Center and she is currently Coordinator of Educational Curatorship for the
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, in the framework of which she carried out numerous experiences that cross museum education with other ways of perceiving and
reflecting on contemporary art.
She coordinated issues 50 and 60 of "Poéticas Contemporáneas" of Ramona. Revista de arte sin imágenes. She produced the Bola de Nieve project for Fundación Telefónica when it was
beginning to be something more than a concept. She teaches horizontal reflection workshops, a theoretical-practical format for the deepening, debate and practice of writing about art. She
designed courses specially requested by the Asociación Amigos del Malba, which function as introductory prologues of artists and issues. She was an adjunct professor of Collecting and
Art Market in Claudio Golombek's professorships at UMSA and participated as an assistant professor in Dr. Andrea Giunta's professorship at UBA.

The work process
I have always worked on the link with the other. 
 All this prompted me to rethink myself in relation to others, to the


The first glance I had of another was my mother's. When I was born,
my father gave her an 8mm camera, silent. When I was born my
father gave her an 8mm camera, silent, with which she recorded my
first steps and my short relationship with him. His gaze was recorded
on tapes for many years in a box. I could see on those tapes how
that gaze on me began to build our relationship. That's how she saw
me, that's how she recorded me on tape. As an adult I was able to
discover how my father looked at me.
OTRO was a project to which I arrived after two projects that helped
me think about the place I occupy in relation to others: PAR and
HUNT.
other. China was HUNT's deer, the perfect excuse to explore each
PAR I started exploring love (in the broadest sense) until I realized
that I was investigating loneliness. They were photos that I captured
for four years as a voyeur of couples that I saw as a visual unit or
pattern. Photography.
but without time and space.
In HUNT, I analyzed the step before that PAR unit, and used the
analogy of hunting as a hunt for desire. What more basic hunt than a
prey looking you in the eye like a deer, facing its fate? The bullet in
the forehead. Painting.
Traveling through China I came across a photo from 1964 in an inland
village, which aroused a special interest: in it a whole village is in
front of a camera, where all the strata of that meeting (almost 1000
people) resulted in a shot where you see the need to be all in the
frame, to be part, to be with the others. I was interested in exploring
that otherness, what all the others meant, how each one builds their
individuality, when everyone there is uniformed, standardized. The
photo was a trigger.
family, to friends, to society. The distance and closeness of the
bodies, the look from one to the other and vice versa.
I began a series of actions in order to investigate from a purely visual
point of view the construction of oneself in relation to others.
The first was to approach a language that I did not have in my
previous works: video. And on the other hand, the firm decision to
put the body, my body. And that of others.
I invited people to participate who evoked my first sketches in China,
the idea of the different, that China on the other side of the world, of
my world, and to observe the bridges that we could build for each
other.
First I decided to ask all friends and acquaintances, friends with
oriental features, as a way to recall that journey from me to China,
I started a series of individual interviews in my studio. The personal
interview was key to generate the bridge between the participant and
me, and the next participant.
In SOMOS EL RIO, the first of the videos, I started from the idea of
generating a portrait as a living photograph: a portrait in permanent
becoming, where we are all in each other. Six participants. I filmed
each participant for a minute and a half, looking at a fixed camera, in
silence. This video was exhibited at MAR, Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Mar del Plata, together with 174 photos from
China, where a dialogue between possible spaces and diverse
identities took place. It was selected for the Itaú Prize, Argentina.

the work process II

From this piece, I was interested in continuing to explore with other were. It was interesting to analyze the atmosphere of serenity and
participations, of full nudes, where the skin, the exposure, the dedication that occurred in all the interviews.

surrender, the intimacy, were essential.

I began to work on the relationship between bodies, looks,

encounters. All the guests were invited by close contacts, it was a
private call, of closeness, because I thought that a certain security
was required, a guarantee of the intimacy necessary to achieve a
close, kind, loving delivery. By chance, 10 women and 10 men came
to the appointment, I also included myself so we became 21.

I developed a day of filming, the interviews were personal, individual,

only the performer and I in the Photographic Studio where I
summoned them.

Later, from the edition appeared ENTREVISTA, DANZA, MIGRANTES,

They arrived one by one, following a strict protocol, in silence,
SOLO, different videos that bring me closer to a look at myself and
starting the conversation on a rotating stage that I rented ad hoc, I
with whom I also build myself. A back and forth loop of energy,
asked them a series of questions about their intimacy, the other,
information, becoming.

trust, skin, art, and above all why they came to this invitation, always
dressed.
For the editing I chose black backgrounds, without specifying
specific spaces, only their naked bodies, turning, offering themselves
At the end of the questions I invited them to take off their clothes and
genuinely to meet and talk with others.

pose naked, staring at the horizon while the stage began to rotate
about 10 full turns.
In the videos I generated a series of situations that did not exist,
where after the editing the intimacy became a crowded visual
With five cameras I recorded different angles of the participants, and
conversation where everyone is part of it.

after a full day of recording, different emotions, reactions, impulses,

climates arose, where in the midst of that perfect intimacy everyone In addition to the videos, I used the same strategy of generating
undressed body and soul. With some we ended up hugging naked, hypothetical situations in different media, among them some
with others we cried, or talking about anecdotes of each one's life, paintings and ink drawings on paper, also with imaginary scenes,
signs that this project was beginning to give me the clues of who we where the participants coincide without having met.

One day of recording

 Selected ITAÚ AWARD 2018

We are the river / 04:15 https://vimeo.com/214106531

2017. DESTIERRO. 

MAR Contemporary Art Museum, Mar
del Plata, Argentina.
Curators: Maximo Jacoby -
Luz Rodriguez Penas.
2018. Memory Art Centre Haroldo Conti. 

Curator: Paula Landoni.
Wunsch Gallery

Other. Sketches.
Interview / 05:54 https://vimeo.com/384838687
Dance / 04:18 https://vimeo.com/384836807
Alone / 16:00 https://vimeo.com/384833377
Migrants / 07:00 https://vimeo.com/384830252
Wunsch Gallery. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Them (men). 1,50x 1,80 m. Acrílico. Them (women). 1,50x 1,80 m. Acrylic.

Construction. 1,50x 1,80 m. Acrílico.

Give. 1,50x 1,80 m. Acrílico.
Alone. Video. Interview. Video.
Ink, paper Hannemulle 400 g.

0,66x0,99 m.
Ink, paper Hannemulle 400 g.

0,66x0,99 m.
Resources

Norma / 02:34:19 https://vimeo.com/233837482

Previous

Par Project

https://danielromano.net/par-project
2013. PAR, book

286 pages. 

Curators Rodrigo Alonso 

and Valeria González. 

Editorial Asunto Impreso. 

Units: 2000 copies.
2013. PAR, exhibition. 

ARTE X ARTE Art Gallery

Buenos Aires. 

Curators: Rodrigo Alonso 

and Valeria González. 
2018. 

PAR, Espejo de Tela textil exhibition. 

MAR Contemporary Art Museum

Curators: Constanza Martinez
Previous

Hunt Project

https://danielromano.net/hunt
HUNT, 0,70x1,30 m. Acrylic.
2015. HUNT, paintings.
Argentina Consulate, Nueva York.
Curator: Federico Baeza.
Bio
Datos personales

Born in Argentina, 1965. 
Lives and works in Buenos Aires.
He studied Law, Photography and Design.
danielromano.net@mac.com
IG @danielromanonet
IG @artedanielromano
www.danielromano.net

Solo Exhibitions

2010. Portraits, painting. Isidro Miranda Contemporary Art Gallery,Buenos Aires. Texts: Laura Messing.

2010. MASK, painting. Boulevard Sáenz Peña Gallery, Buenos Aires. Texts: Fabiana Barreda.

2012. ALTAR, photographic installation. Boulevard Sáenz Peña Gallery, Buenos Aires. Texts: Julio Sánchez. 

2013. PAR, photography. ArtexArte Gallery, Buenos Aires. Texts: Rodrigo Alonso and Valeria González.

2015 HUNT, painting. Consulate of Argentina in New York. Texts: Federico Baeza.

2016. HUNT, painting. Gualberto Hernández Gallery, New York.

2016, HUNT, painting. Air Contemporary Art Gallery, Buenos Aires. Texts: Federico Baeza.

2016. PAR, photography. Casona de los Olivera. Contemporary Art Centre, Buenos Aires. Text: Rodrigo Alonso y Valeria González.

2017. OTRO, videoinstallation, Fundación Esteban Lisa, Buenos Aires, Text: Mariana Rodriguez Iglesias.

2019. Art school La Costa, Carabela Santa Teresita. Installation. Photography and videoart.

2019. Art Gallery Pinamar. Hunt paints.

2020. Wunsch Gallery, Buenos Aires. OTRO ensayo, painting, draw, videos.

Group Exhibitions

2008. 26 Artist 26, painting. Buenos Aires.

2009. Posdata al Arte, Art Gallery, painting. Buenos Aires.

2010. XXXIV Symposium of Literature, Westminster, Scientific Society, Buenos Aires.

2010. OHPEN, Art Gallery, Buenos Aires. Texts: Grace Bayala.

2012. Pampa del Indio, a benefit of Qom Community, Chaco, Argentina. Texts: Platener Federico and Máximo Jacoby.

2015. BUENOS AIRES PHOTO, photography. Recoleta Cultural Center, Gallery Glamart, curated by Rodrigo Alonso.

2016. ALTAR, Clemente Soto Vélez The Art Centre, New York. Curated by Cecilia Medina.

2016. PRINTED MATTER'S at MoMA PS1. New York.

2016. Diana Aisenberg Invites. Trabucco House, Vicente Lopez, Argentina.

2016. FELIFA. Photo Book Fair 2016. FoLA.

2017. DESTIERRO. MAR Museum of Contemporary Art, Mar del Plata, Argentina. Text: Maximo Jacoby y Luz Rodriguez Penas.

2017. Video "OTRO somos el río" selected  1er. Festival de Videopoesia UNGS. Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina.

2017. Video "OTRO somos el río" selected en PLAY Semana de Videoarte. Extension Universitaria UNNE y Centro Cultural Universitario
Nordeste, Argentina.

2017. PRINTED MATTER'S at MoMA PS1. New York.

2018. SORDOS RUIDOS. Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti. Text: Paula Landoni

2018. DESIR. WUNSCH GALLERY, París. 

2018. OTRO, Somos el río, video selected ITAÚ Prize.

2018. ESPEJO DE TELA. MAR Museum of Contemporary Art, Mar del Plata, Argentina. Text: Constanza Martinez & Ruth Corcuera.

2018. BAphoto, photography. La Rural. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

2018. Salón Felix Amador, Vicente Lopez, video.

2019. Wunsch gallery + Unicgallery, Paris. Les Affaires de Nina, videoart.

2019. VIII Bienal Internacional de Arte Textil Contemporáneo WTA, Madrid, España. Text. Constanza Martinez.

Workshops

2004. works with Laura Messing until 2011.

2008 / 2012. Clinic Work in Contemporary Art, Fabiana Barreda, artist.

2009 / 2010. works with Juan Doffo.

2011. works with Lucrecia Urbano, Zona Imaginaria.

2013 / 2014. Clinic Work in Contemporary Art, Diana Aisenberg, artist.

2016. Espacio Dos Puntos. English for artists and curators.

2019. ON/ON Workshop. Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Zona Imaginaria. Buenos Aires.

Published

2013 published PAR, book, 286 pages. Curated by Rodrigo Alonso and Valeria González. Editorial Printed Subject. Circulation: 2,000.
www.danielromano.net