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.

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.

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.

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.

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.