TOKIO 2038

PAINTING

Acrylic and oil on canvas.

Format of 162 x 130 cm. (63.77 x 51.18 in.)

Year of realization 2016

Signed in the bottom right of the piece.

Published in the book Malefic Time, 110 Katanas, page 2-3

This atmosphere painting by Romulo Royo is clearly a key exponent in his science fiction work. Here, in an endless fugue, it hits us agonizingly with technology and apocalyptic publicity that in its tangle saturated with decadence composes a poetic plastic where we can immerse ourselves in a personal and fascinating Tokyo.

A work where the fusion of saturation, decadence and plastic beauty gives us a painting of surprising harmony, a key piece in the artist's career. 

Painting has always seemed torn between an inward and an outward gaze: between vision and perception, between our dreams and the concrete, highly politicized conditions framing our comprehension of the world and what it might become. Today is no different. After a period in which the medium has been dominated by process-based abstraction, the figure – and representation with it – is ascendant again. But, if the 1990s and 2000s saw artists such as John Currin distorting classical form while others, following Gerhard Richter, mimicked photography, today’s figuration displays a distinctly different character. Gone, for the most part, are the echoes of old masters; gone, too, are the blurs of photorealism. What takes their place, instead, is a highly idiosyncratic approach filtered through pronounced affect, comic-book and sci-fi aesthetics, dreamy narratives and an eagerness to engage with our political moment without forfeiting the sensuousness of the medium.

- David Geers (Sotheby's)

"Those alleys you can see there, on the left handside, they are filled up with clans who adopted the principles of ancient samurais warriors. They aren't from the sun, but either from the moon. They have got their own codes".

- Malefic Time, 110 Katanas