Information — Armando Román

Armando Román

Armando Román is a Chicago-based artist who creates works on paper that combine digital brushstrokes with physical marks made using crayons, colored pencils, and pastels. Drawing from the Mexican landscape—both as a physical place and a repository of cultural memory—his compositions investigate the relationship between center and periphery, order and instability. Geometric grids, ornamental borders, and patterns informed by Mexican folk art become systems that are simultaneously constructed and disrupted, allowing multiple visual centers to emerge and coexist.

Román's work intertwines religious iconography with queer aesthetics, exploring the tension between inherited structures and personal identity. His images inhabit the space between euphoric belonging and dysphoric rejection, embracing the double bind of pleasure and pain that accompanies his experience as a queer religious person. Through repetition, pattern, and shifting perspectives, his drawings ask how cultural, spiritual, and geographic borders can function not only as sites of exclusion, but also as spaces where identity is continually negotiated and remade.

armandoroman582@gmail.com