Nicolas Romero: Soft Power

Written by KF Sydney
Published: July 15, 2025
In Features

Nicolas Romero has been turning the sides of buildings into the inside of his mind for decades, but he still can’t get used to the kids looking in on him through the glass of his converted storefront studio — “At some point, I’m gonna say I look like a hamster!”

Like his work—which started with bombing his Buenos Aires neighborhood at 16 and now ranges from photo realistic depictions of total strangers’ faces interrupted by bursts of psychedelic abstraction, to surreal figures assembled from vegetables and blingy status symbols—Romero’s conversation is eccentric, thoughtful, colorful, provocative and restless.

Feeling like a pet on display is just one of many adjustments the Argentinian-born street artist and muralist has had to make since a COVID-era move to Spain. “In Argentina or Buenos Aires, you can do whatever you want…the police are not really taking care of what you’re doing.” But Western Europe has been different, less free-reign and more bureaucratic. His first project in Madrid, a mega mural for the City Council, required him to submit countless sketches met with a cycle of rejections. His final sketch made its way into their hearts with one key addition. “That year I was working with the relationship with how we empathize with cats, how humans just project empathies onto kitties and fluffy cats. The City Council of Madrid kept refusing my proposals, and then I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna add some cats.’ And when I included the cats, they approved that. Because we can fight against fascist people or politicians. But with cats, you know—we need these kind of fluffy soldier cats.”

Over the course of our interview, Romero explains his move to the Old World as a process of an artist from the global South, doing an almost anthropological study of the global North. His analysis of how power works includes a fascination with the fate of the real-life orca that performed in Free Willy (“My algorithm of YouTube is full of whales”), to the long shadow of religion over public life in Spain.

“I really think that it comes from all these past centuries of Catholic system rules and God and things,” he says, introducing his obsession with a religious painting he saw in the Prado Museum. “This is an erotic Boucher-like piece of art. But it’s religious. It’s this situation where the Virgin is squirting milk far out of her nipples to the mouth of this saint. And for me it’s like…dude, this canvas was made in the 17th century, but this is erotic. I really believe that somebody masturbates with this, some monk or something, because this doesn’t make sense to me.”

“When I was talking with the engineer, he calculated that the velocity and the pressure of a woman’s nipple is not able to contain that kind of velocity of the milk.”

But things not making sense has never stopped Romero. His full-spectrum collage-like murals reflect the process of a mind that’s constantly drawing connections between disparate ideas. “I feel that I’m becoming more of a conceptual artist, when I get in these situations where I start to understand a structure, or I see a painting that I really want to investigate. I have become more like a journalist than a painter. Then the painting is like a consequence of that research.”

When he says “research,” he isn’t joking. “I asked my therapist, an engineer, and a gynecologist if that situation of the milk going out from the tit with that much distance…if it was possible or not, you know? And it’s kind of like an obsession. When I was talking with the engineer, he calculated that the velocity and the pressure of a woman’s nipple is not able to contain that kind of velocity of the milk. I mean, for that thing to happen, it’s supposed to be like a bomb, and then suddenly, at that moment, the milk can go that distance, with that pressure, you know?”

As for the audience’s ability to keep up with Romero’s pop-political narratives, sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t. In one of his murals he positions nine kittens around a Communist Manifesto with a portrait of Karl Marx centered above their heads. “The word communism in Spanish has nine letters. That’s the reason that I painted nine cats. And then I put the portrait in the middle of the wall—the cats are contemplating Karl Marx, who created the theory of communism and blah, blah, blah. But it was crazy because there were some people that were really angry with me because I was using cats for a political reason. For other people they were just like, ‘Okay, they’re cats.’ They didn’t understand what was the meaning behind the mural. They were saying things that aren’t really true, like ‘No, these fluffy cats belong because the guy in the middle is like a veterinary doctor that was really famous.’ Or, ‘No dude, this is like Karl Marx, dude.’ And suddenly my wall has a lot of interpretations that don’t belong to me.”

Although he’s a disciple of revolutionary muralists like Diego Rivera, Romero admits to being pessimistic about the ability of art to change things in our current moment. “I don’t have the feeling that we have the power right now to change things. You know what I’m saying? We are kind of tired in this moment.” But the work still serves another more personal purpose in a world that’s increasingly more difficult to live in. “I have to have some armor to talk or be curious about some subjects. And I think that in these uncertain times, we have that. We need to create our own armor with our own communities and try to talk about that through our art, because everything is getting more and more difficult. But for me, the only way that I see myself is just painting. If I don’t have painting as a way to defend myself against the bad guys, I don’t have anything, you know?”