Toward a Poetics of Multiplicity: On Juan Carlos Romero’s Experiments in Repetition
On Now:
May 1, 202405.01.24
Re: Collection

Juan Carlos Romero, Violencia, 1977. Ink on paper, 70 × 52 in. (177.8 × 132.1 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

AUTHORS
Mariana Fernández
ARTISTS
Juan Carlos Romero

Re: Collection invites a range of historians, curators, and artists to respond to the artworks in our collection through approachable texts.

From the mid-1960s until his death in 2017, the Argentine artist Juan Carlos Romero used various methods of printmaking to create posters, flyers, and photographic collages, using efficient, unadorned typographies to critique Argentina’s sociopolitical climate. Prioritizing iterability for the sake of distribution, the artist dreamed of saturating Buenos Aires with his short, sharp messages pushing language to the point where meaning, and sometimes literally words themselves, began breaking down. The writer and curator Mariana Fernández explores the plays on legibility that allowed Romero’s denatured texts to circulate amidst a fraught context of censorship and repression.

A poster on blue paper with black letters as tall as the paper itself. The letters spell out “VIOLENCIA,” with only half of the letter V visible, followed by I, O, and L. Above the horizontal portion of the L, there’s a vertical oval stamp in black ink. Across the center of the stamp the word VIOLENCIA is printed. The oval portion at the top of the stamp has faintly printed lettering that might read, “PARTES DE.” The bottom of the stamp reads, “LA HISTORIA.”

Juan Carlos Romero, Violencia, 1977. Ink on paper, 70 × 52 in. (177.8 × 132.1 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

A poster on blue paper with black letters as tall as the paper itself. The visible letters spell “ENCI,” with half of the letter E visible, followed by N, C, I, and half of the letter A.

Juan Carlos Romero, Violencia, 1977. Ink on paper, 70 × 52 in. (177.8 × 132.1 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

Thick black stenciled letters reminiscent of the rugged typeface seen in Western “Wanted” posters spell out the word “VIOLENCIA” across dozens of flyers plastered on the walls and floor of the main gallery of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) in Buenos Aires. The word creates a claustrophobic effect in its obsessive repetition, engulfing the viewer in its various cyclical, and even unnamed, manifestations. Coupled with a display, in another gallery, of news clippings from the sensationalist magazine Así (with headlines such as “Violence Breaks out in Rosario,” or the almost satirical “Violence after Church”) and a selection of fragments culled from religious, philosophical, and political texts (by Plato, Marx, Engels, Fidel Castro, and Leonardo Da Vinci), Juan Carlos Romero’s exhibition Violencia (1973) was at once an exploration of the limits of meaning and a jab at how real, lived horrors are reduced to the abstractions of political theory, casualty statistics, and sensationalist headlines. 

The Argentine artist’s seminal 1973 exhibition encapsulates many of the key themes that pervaded the works he created during the rise of Argentina’s New Left and last military dictatorship that, nonetheless, gripped the country for almost a decade. Across mediums including printmaking, photography, performance art, artist’s books, and mail art, Romero experimented with repetition as a means of corporeally engaging with the audience, often leaving them to piece together the content of his works. Romero’s various uses of repetition through mass print technologies and serialized photography allowed him to navigate between visibility and opacity—a strategy through which he was able to articulate sardonic, often blunt political critiques within a context of censorship and repression.

A poster on blue paper with black letters as tall as the paper itself, some fragmented and some whole. From left to right, the poster reads, “VIOL VIOL ENCIA ENCIA.”

Juan Carlos Romero, Violencia, 1977. Ink on paper, 70 × 52 in. (177.8 × 132.1 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

A single-sheet booklet, bound accordion-style. Laid flat, several pages have been folded, so that only four pages are visible. From left to right, the pages contain the following: A title page, with the words “Romero” and “Violencia” above and below a large stenciled “V”; two pages, each bearing the same repeated black-and-white image of a man in mid-scream; and a page of text that states:  LA VIOLENCIA SE COMPONE DE CUATRO COSAS: PESO - FUERZA - MOVIMIENTO - GOLPE LA MÁS PODEROSA DE ELLAS ES LA QUE MENOS DURACIÓN TIENE 1 - TODO PESO DESEA DESCENDER POR LA VÍA MÁS DIRECTA 2 - EL PESO DESEA DURAR 3 - EL PESO ES VENCIDO POR LA FUERZA 4 - LA FUERZA ES UNA VIOLENCIA 5 - LA LENTITUD LA ACRECIENTA, LA VELOCIDAD LA AGOTA 6 - SU POTENCIA AUMENTA CON LOS OBSTÁCULOS 7 - NADA SE MUEVE SIN LA FUERZA 8 - LA FUERZA NACE DEL MOVIMIENTO - TIENE TRES OFICIOS: TIRAR - EMPUJAR - INMOVILIZAR 9 - EL MOVIMIENTO NACE DE LA MUERTE DE LA FUERZA 10 - EL GOLPE NACE DE LA MUERTE DEL MOVIMIENTO 11 - EL GOLPE ES HIJO DEL MOVIMIENTO Y NIETO DE LA FUERZA LEONARDO DA VINCI - BREVIARIOS – 1492

Juan Carlos Romero, Violencia, 1977. Ink on paper, 70 × 52 in. (177.8 × 132.1 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

A single-sheet booklet, bound accordion-style. All pages are unfolded and laid flat. In the far left, far right, and center spreads, the word “VIOLENCIA” appears in oversized black text on a light blue background, with the edges of the word cut off. From left to right, the other spreads of the book contain: a title page, with the words “Romero” and “Violencia” above and below a large stenciled “V”; two pages each bearing the same repeated black-and-white image of a man in mid-scream; and a page of text that states:  LA VIOLENCIA SE COMPONE DE CUATRO COSAS: PESO - FUERZA - MOVIMIENTO - GOLPE LA MÁS PODEROSA DE ELLAS ES LA QUE MENOS DURACIÓN TIENE 1 - TODO PESO DESEA DESCENDER POR LA VÍA MÁS DIRECTA 2 - EL PESO DESEA DURAR 3 - EL PESO ES VENCIDO POR LA FUERZA 4 - LA FUERZA ES UNA VIOLENCIA 5 - LA LENTITUD LA ACRECIENTA, LA VELOCIDAD LA AGOTA 6 - SU POTENCIA AUMENTA CON LOS OBSTÁCULOS 7 - NADA SE MUEVE SIN LA FUERZA 8 - LA FUERZA NACE DEL MOVIMIENTO - TIENE TRES OFICIOS: TIRAR - EMPUJAR - INMOVILIZAR 9 - EL MOVIMIENTO NACE DE LA MUERTE DE LA FUERZA 10 - EL GOLPE NACE DE LA MUERTE DEL MOVIMIENTO 11 - EL GOLPE ES HIJO DEL MOVIMIENTO Y NIETO DE LA FUERZA LEONARDO DE VINCI – BREVIARIOS – 1492

Juan Carlos Romero, Violencia, 1977. Ink on paper, 70 × 52 in. (177.8 × 132.1 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

In the Argentine context of surveillance and erasure, Romero’s aim in these works might be read less as a desire to disappear and more as an effort to inscribe himself within a matrix of multiplicity.

Romero first began working with stencil lettering in 1968, crafting bold graphic compositions reminiscent of Op art’s illusory movement. Works like R (Romero) and M (Mundo), both from 1968, and the untitled engraving from Romero's series of Gráficos, 1969, are composed of systematically printed single letters, each becoming fragmented and almost illegible in its rhythmic repetition. Shortly afterward, the artist developed Unidad serial (Serial Unity, 1971)—a similar series of geometric patterns created with stencils. While these works reflect the same concern with repetition as a means of eroding meaning, here Romero does away with the handmade qualities of printmaking by swapping letterpress for offset printing. Initially presented on three long strips of paper in the group show Grabado. Arte para todos at Art Gallery International in Buenos Aires in 1971, the series quickly transcended the confines of the institution, with editioned flyers disseminating fragments of the “original” work. One statement by Romero on such a flyer read: “This fragment of the serial unit allows you to have a print which is part of an experience that is also being perceived by viewer-actors in different places . . . The work keeps growing.” 1 The multiplication facilitated by offset printing transformed Unidad serial into objects meant to be handled, deciphered, passed on, and remade; objects that collapsed the binary between original and copy through their infinite reproductive potential.

This work on paper features a square of typographic markings on an off-white background. Throughout the square, thin fragments of the letter G are printed in overlaid columns and rows.

Juan Carlos Romero, Untitled from the series Gráficos, 1969. Engraving on paper 19 1/8 × 13 1/8 in. (48.6 × 33.3 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

A black-and-white photo of the interior of a gallery space. Several people stand reading large sheets of printed text that is laid out in a V shape on the floor before them. Behind them, members of a crowd talk among themselves.

Juan Carlos Romero, Swift en Swift (1970). Installation view, Premio Swift de Grabado, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 1970. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero

Romero would subsequently depart from this self-reflexive investigation of printing principles, yet his exploration of legibility—of opacity, erasure, and fragmentation—remained a constant, underpinning a practice that delved into the role of multiplication and repetition with an uncommon poeticism. He presented his first “definitively political work” at the third edition of the annual Salón Swift de Grabado: an installation titled Swift en Swift (1970) made of four pieces of paper, each four meters long, containing fragments of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. 2  The appropriated texts centered on the exploitation of labor and were printed using the stenciled letters from Romero’s earlier geometric works, although their legibility was hindered by the absence of punctuation or spacing between characters. Audiences were forced into a position of complicity with the artist as they navigated the work slowly to decode its meaning, a hidden denunciation aimed at the working conditions at the Swift meatpacking plant, which funded the exhibition.

On a sheet of white paper there are three black-and-white photographs arranged in two rows. In the top row is a single photograph of the artist Juan Carlos Romero that looks somewhat like a mugshot. In the bottom row there is a photo of an open hand and another one of the top of a foot. On each of these images, bright red X’s and green striping are painted over the top. The X’s appear in the negative space around the edges of the body parts, while the green striping covers parts of the body near the edges.

Juan Carlos Romero, Frente, Arriba, Adelante (I)(Front, Above, Forward [I]) from the series La vida de la muerte (The Life of Death), 1980. Chromogenic print and paint on paper, 32 11/16 × 25 3/16 in. (83 × 64 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

On a sheet of white paper, three black-and-white photographs are arranged in two rows. On the top row is a close-up image of the back of the artist Juan Carlos Romero’s head. On the bottom row, respectively, a picture of the back of a hand and the bottom of a foot. On each of these images, bright red X’s and blue striping are painted over top. The X’s appear in the center of the body parts, while the blue striping takes up the negative space around their edges.

Juan Carlos Romero, Dorso, Abajo, Atrás (II)(Back, Below, Behind [II]), from the series La vida de la muerte (The Life of Death), 1980. Chromogenic print and paint on paper, 32 11/16 × 25 3/16 in. (83 × 64 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

A series of four works on paper is laid out here in a grid. In the upper left corner, a square contains a circle of text above a stenciled caption reading “CAMUFLAJE.”

Juan Carlos Romero, Camuflaje I, II, III, y IV (Camouflage 1, 2, 3, and 4), from the series La vida de la muerte (The Life of Death), 1980. Text, photographs, and paint on panel, 31½ × 27 9/16 in. (80 × 70 cm). © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero

A series of four works on paper is laid out here in a grid. In the upper right corner, a head-on photograph of the artist, Juan Carlos Romero, shows his face covered with painted orange and purple X’s, accompanied by the caption “CRIPTOSIS.”

Juan Carlos Romero, Camuflaje I, II, III, y IV (Camouflage 1, 2, 3, and 4), from the series La vida de la muerte (The Life of Death), 1980. Text, photographs, and paint on panel, 31½ × 27 9/16 in. (80 × 70 cm). © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero

A series of four works on paper is laid out here in a grid. In the lower left corner, a head-on photograph of the artist, Juan Carlos Romero, shows his face covered in short vertical lines of blue and red paint; the caption reads “MIMETISMO.”

Juan Carlos Romero, Camuflaje I, II, III, y IV (Camouflage 1, 2, 3, and 4), from the series La vida de la muerte (The Life of Death), 1980. Text, photographs, and paint on panel, 31½ × 27 9/16 in. (80 × 70 cm). © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero

A series of four works on paper is laid out here in a grid. In the lower right corner, a head-on photograph of the artist, Juan Carlos Romero, shows his face covered in thick horizontal stripes of orange and green paint. An orange X is painted over his throat, and red tears are painted below his eyes. The caption reads “APOSEMATISMO.”

Juan Carlos Romero, Camuflaje I, II, III, y IV (Camouflage 1, 2, 3, and 4), from the series La vida de la muerte (The Life of Death), 1980. Text, photographs, and paint on panel, 31½ × 27 9/16 in. (80 × 70 cm). © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero

Romero’s engagements with self-portraiture similarly play with concealment and opacity through repetition. He began the series La vida de la muerte (The Life of Death) in 1980 at the height of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” a period marked by brutal violence, repression, and disappearances. In this series, Romero turned more explicitly to the serialization and fragmentation of his own body as a form of both political critique and survival. One collage from the series, Frente, Arriba, Adelante (I) (Front, Above, Forward, 1980) features grainy photos of Romero’s face, open palm, and the top of his foot, while its counterpart, Dorso, Abajo, Atrás (II) (Back, Below, Behind, 1980), displays the back of Romero’s head, the top of his hand, and the bottom of his foot. Each photo is intervened with a series of finger-painted markings: poignant X marks that “miss” Romero’s body in the forward-facing photos and “strike” his back and the undersides of his hands and feet. In Camuflaje I, II, III, y IV (Camouflage 1, 2, 3, and 4; 1980)also from this series, Romero presents three nearly identical headshots of his face, each intervened with different body paint designs. Accompanying these images is an appropriated text discussing the biological advantages of camouflage. The stenciled words on the photos each refer to a method of camouflage outlined in the text, systems of defense described as “not completely efficient.” “Some will succumb anyway,” the text reads, “but those who survive will have gained the opportunity to reproduce.” 3 

In the Argentine context of surveillance and erasure, Romero’s aim in these works might be read less as a desire to disappear and more as an effort to inscribe himself within a matrix of multiplicity. Drawing on Tina Campt’s brilliant analysis on the use of mugshots, passport photos, and other forms of “identification photography” designed to regulate the movement of bodies, Romero’s self-portraits can be seen as acts of refusal through their subversion of the biometric techniques produced by or for the state. 4 The inscription and repetition of Romero’s personal vocabulary of symbols simultaneously obscures and highlights the component parts of his body, rendering it illegible in a classificatory sense while allowing it to endlessly, variably mutate.

A rectangular poster oriented horizontally. Against a yellow-green gradient backdrop, the word-fragment “EXTINC” is printed in capital block letters in a serif font.

Juan Carlos Romero, La desaparición (2) Ringuelet, Buenos Aires (Disappearance [1] Ringuelet, Buenos Aires), 1995. Letterpress print, 19 5/8 × 27 1/2 in. (49.9 × 69.9 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

A rectangular poster oriented horizontally. Against a red-yellow gradient backdrop, the word-fragment “DESOCU” is printed in capital block letters in a serif font.

Juan Carlos Romero, La desaparición (1) Ringuelet, Buenos Aires (Disappearance [1] Ringuelet, Buenos Aires), 1995. Letterpress print, 19 5/8 × 27 1/2 in. (49.9 × 69.9 cm). Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York. © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero. Photo: Arturo Sánchez

Juan Carlos Romero, La desaparición (Disappearance), 2000. Print installation exhibited in an abandoned lime kiln in Ringuelet, Argentina in 1995 (top) and at the 7th Bienal de La Habana in 2000 (bottom left and right). © and courtesy the Estate of Juan Carlos Romero

This logic is more explicitly thematized in the iterative sequence of cut-off words Romero began presenting in the mid-1990s to reflect on Argentina’s state of hyperinflation and social displacement. Stenciled letters spelling out “margin,” “extinc,” “exclusi,” “carenc,” and “desocu”—incomplete versions of the words “marginalización” (marginalization), “extinción” (extinction), “exclusión” (exclusion), “carencia” (shortage), and “desocupación” (unemployment)—first appeared in an artist’s book by Romero titled 5 poesías pobres (Five Poor Poems, 1995), whose unbound format allowed viewers to rearrange the pages. Later that year, and more urgently exploiting the low cost and hyper-reproducibility of Xerox printing, Romero plastered dozens of typographic posters reading “EXTINC” and “DESOCU” throughout an abandoned lime kiln in the town of Ringuelet. 5  He titled these works La desaparición (The Disappearance)evoking the haunting marginality of a site that once served as an important source of local employment. 

In 2000, when Romero wheat-pasted the fragmented words “DESOCU,” “EXCLUS,” “MARGIN,” “EXTINC” onto a fourteen-meter wall under the same title in the 7th Havana Biennial, La desaparición could be read as a reference to the ongoing state of unemployment affecting more than two million Argentines at the time. Alternatively, it could be seen as a harrowing reminder of the desaparecidos of the dictatorship, or as a self-referential nod to the ephemeral nature of the action. In each scenario, repetition and fragmentation conjoin to refuse the fixity of meaning, enabling the viewer to “complete” the work as maker themselves. Like the wider project of approaching Romero’s archive, La desaparición invites a return to an original that is never singular or unique but is instead always a site of potential multiplication and disruption. Particularly now, as Argentina once again becomes mired in far-right politics, these print-based interventions continue to circulate with the same urgency as they did in their first publication—not as mere copies but as originals that in turn give rise to new originals, each iteration insisting on repetition as an act of political resistance.

1. The original Spanish reads: “Este fragmento de la unidad serial permite que Ud. tenga un grabado que forma parte de la experiencia que está siendo percibida por espectadores-actores en distintos lugares… La obra continúa creciendo.” Juan Carlos Romero, Unidad serial (Serial Unit, 1971). Offset print, 11 × 8 11/16 in. (28 × 22 cm.) Reproduced in Fernando Davis, Juan Carlos Romero: Cartografías del cuerpo, asperezas de la palabra (Buenos Aires: Fundación OSDE, 2009), 12. Translation by the author.
2. Juan Carlos Romero, interview by Mariano Mestman and Ana Longoni, in Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el 68 argentino (Buenos Aires: El Cielo por Asalto, 2000), 362.
3. Translated by the author.
4. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 5. I’d like to thank my editor Nicole Kaack for bringing this text to my attention. 
5. La desaparición at Ringuelet formed part of the exhibition Todos o ninguno (1995) by Grupo Escombros. For more on the collective’s work across photography and performance, see Alan Ruiz’s essay “Load-Bearing Subjects: On Grupo Escombros’s ‘Teoría del arte’” on ISLAA’s website, https://islaa.org/explore/editorial_ruiz-escombros.
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