Colombian Artist Guillermo Romero Breaks His Paintings to Put Memory Back Together

Colombian artist Guillermo Romero’s new book, Rompismo, explores what survives when a painting breaks apart. From his Bogotá studio, his practice raises a larger Latin American question: can transformation preserve memory without turning identity into another product for global consumption?

The Painting Remembers

A finished canvas usually marks an arrival. For Guillermo Romero, it can become raw material again. In Rompismo: Manifesto, Thought, and Work of Guillermo Romero, the Colombian painter gathers a philosophy built around a deceptively simple proposition: “To break is not to destroy; it is to transform.”

According to the book’s presentation, the fragments come exclusively from his own paintings. Their previous lives remain present in their color and texture, even as a new composition changes their meaning. It is a rule about authorship, not merely a technique for assembling pieces. The artist is working through his own archive.

He began training in watercolor in Buenos Aires in 1985. Oil and acrylic followed, producing surfaces distinguished by thick pigment and movement. In a 2024 interview with university broadcaster LAUD, Romero described questioning his life as a dentist. He left that profession in 1997 to pursue painting.

That changed livelihood gives transformation a personal weight. His manifesto’s Cromorritmia, or color-rhythm, and Texturología vital, or vital texturology, connect emotion with material. A fragment is not anonymous debris. It carries something he already made, then asks him to reconsider it.

Working primarily with acrylic and a palette knife, he builds textured surfaces where color has physical presence. Breaking those surfaces means rearranging not only an image, but the accumulated labor beneath it.

Beyond the Creative Economy

The economic backdrop is substantial. Colombia’s cultural and creative activities generated 47.8 trillion pesos in value added in 2025, according to preliminary DANE figures reported by the Culture Ministry. The sector represented 2.89 percent of national value added.

But that total is not an art-market valuation. Between 2023 and 2025, functional creations, including software, design, and advertising, averaged 53.2 percent of cultural and creative value added. Arts and heritage accounted for 29.8 percent.

Even that smaller category includes cultural tourism and education, not just visual artists. The figures therefore describe a broad economic structure, not the income reaching an independent painter’s studio.

For assessing cultural policy, the distinction matters: aggregate growth cannot show whether artists can finance publications, maintain workspaces, or conserve earlier work. Romero’s practice makes that last question unusually tangible. When an existing painting becomes material for another, documentation helps preserve the relationship between both versions.

Who Gets to Define Change

Beyond Colombia, a question follows the paintings: who explains them when they travel? Read alongside the artwork, a manifesto offers international audiences the artist’s account of his methods. Cultural diplomacy, viewed through this example, involves circulating ideas as well as exporting objects that represent a country.

His recurring wax palms, silleteros, and palenqueras give that distinction local substance. These are not interchangeable signs of tropical abundance. Within his stated practice, they become vehicles for memory and identity, carried into compositions that change without pretending to begin from nothing.

His Buenos Aires training and Bogotá studio also suggest a regional reading of artistic development, rather than one measured solely against European movements. That does not make Rompismo a political program, or establish that art can repair collective trauma. It offers something narrower: a way to consider continuity without demanding that everything remain intact.

At his ISHVARA house-museum and studio, the old painting need not disappear for another to exist. The break becomes a negotiation with a life already lived.

Email: guillermoromero963@gmail.com

Phone: +57 317 6997099