METAL-PIEL

The face is the ungraspable element of every portrait; it is an epiphany that can never be fully encompassed. Variation and subtle difference point to a repetition of unravelling, in which one can find a potency of simulation—that is, alongside the efficacy of displacement, the fading of appearance into disguise. It may happen that the face is nothing more than the curtain of a scene that only manifests itself in interludes, something subject to constant metamorphosis; yet undoing the face is no simple task. Deleuze reminds us that one can fall into madness. It is no coincidence that the schizophrenic loses, at the same time, the sense of the face—of their own and of others—the sense of landscape, of language, and of its dominant meanings. “To undo the face,” it is stated in A Thousand Plateaus, “is the same as passing through the wall of the signifier, leaving the black hole of subjectivity.” We also know that fantasy governs reality, and that one can never wear a mask without paying for it in flesh. The Other can possess the qualities of an abyss, just as the symbolic order is obscured by the fascinating presence of the phantasmatic object. “We experience this every time we look into another person’s eyes and feel the depth of their gaze.” It is important to bear in mind that when the subject approaches fantasy too closely, (self-)erasure occurs. What remains is art as aphanisis. The gaze of the Gorgon definitively unites dream and death. There is no doubt that the altered face is crucial in Rómulo Royo’s work, who paints on translucent papers as if to evoke, to quote Valéry, that the deepest layer is the skin.

Fernando Castro Flórez Art critic and aesthete

This is a brief selection of Romulo Royo’s work in the series Metal Piel.