“Nelson Román is one of the brightest exponents of today’s Ecuadorian plastic arts. From the artists that have come to plastic art within the last decade, he is one of two or three with a coherent and sustained production… he has created, with no rush or improvisation, his own world of forms and a peculiar symbolic language and he has been a decisive contribution, most ahead of his generation, in the definition of forms and a language which brings a critical illumination of ugliness to the world, penetrating and torn, magical and grotesque”.
Hernán Rodríguez Castelo 1980. Quito, Ecuador.

“… from a portrait of american monsters to magic and american myths and beyond… Nelson Román has always loved to take a chance. And the success of all his great pictorial adventures, has given him trust in the powers of his own art. From his penetrating drawing, from his color rich in resonance, from his wisdom to compose, from his magic to invoke into his visual ceremonies the old and the new, the sacred and the unsacred, the beautiful and the ugly, the full and the empty, what he owns and what he doesn’t, the precious detail and total openness”
Hernán Rodríguez Castelo 2004. Quito, Ecuador.

The ancestral mark of the tale teller… “Nelson Román’s latest works enhance, even more, the contagiousness of his testimony. The same as Courbet, Dix or Matta, just to name these artists, he knows that painting can be a battle, able to handle all of the rejections and obsessions that an artist has to face. The “Argonautas” series shows beings on a journey through an impossible quest for the grail, the man is schemed, idolized, tortured, he is a warrior or a peacemaker, full of symbols, surrounded by luscious vegetation and wild animals, and he left to the storm of his own instincts. Raw light, chromatic splendor reaching its higher level, elliptical flash and the unfocused surface live together with whinnies, kicks, primitive impulses, whispers and deaf rumors”.
Gérard Xuriguera 1998. Paris, France.

“For Román, painting is returning to the origin, retaking childhood paths, transforming facts and hidden happenings, with no moral judgments, in an insatiable search for the –unreal within reality- which transports us through his own schedule. Nelson Román’s work is organized around celebration, destruction and construction, and claiming as his own a world where dream and reality advance at the same time and is based upon the revival of ancestral cultures. Román is even more effective in applying this consciousness for having chosen to live between two worlds and thus being a universal artist”.
Gérard Xuriguera 2004. Paris, France.

“Horror is the main theme of Román’s painting; his monsters: witches, midgets, dictators, fetuses, lunatics, human wastes, are walking through his paintings, as they are in the streets and squares of Latin America”.
Oswaldo Guayasamín 1978. Quito, Ecuador.

“From its beginnings, Ecuadorian art has been based on expressionism. While this movement, since Goya’s beginning, has echoed in its Latin American exponents, two of its most representative figures are the Mexicans José Clemente Orozco and José Luis Cuevas; Nelson Román, a great drawer and impressionist, continues both of their tradition in a dramatic combat towards subjective matter and in his fluent handling of his line, he emerges today as one of the most outstanding characters in his country”.
José Gómez Sicre 1975. Washington D.C., United States of America.

“Nelson Román works in his paintings with reminiscence of something that, for the observer, seems already known. He paints pieces whose secret symbols and figures must be read slowly, like the page of a book and that yet, reach through their colors their –very strong- emotional content… with warm and bright colors, over which a cold luminous blue is lightly spread with round edges and with an organization full of figures, Román obtains a rather mythical image of the world, a world in which all vices and evil are represented by archetypes and symbols. They are against the European way of thinking, since these figures, with their drastic devilish, often evoke romanticism, and at the same time, tell something popular and therefore explain and organize, which is something that Román often uses to leave the observer alone with his thoughts.”
Simone Guski 1986. Bonn, Germany.

“In the wide iconographic development proposed by Nelson Román in the form of a series of monumental paintings which resemble frescos, the spectator experiences a rare pleasure in finding himself suddenly transported to a spectacular universe, different from ours. With a theatrical and illustrative appearance, he is able to translate in the best way the powerful synthesis of a magical past constructed through the popular traditions which Nelson Román masterly presents to make that constant reachable for the contemporary man”.
Gastón Diehl 1991. Paris, France.

“Nelson Román is one of the most outstanding artists who formed the group known as –The Four Musketeers-, which from its beginnings as a group, broke all the parameters of modernity in its conviction and representation, for considering it decorative. Their proposal was opposed to abstract painting, which they considered decorative, thus they planned going back to drawing, but not to naturalism, but showing a conscious and breaking deformation, that is neo-figuration. Román’s work has been, ever since and until today, as well as neo-figurative, it has also been neo-expressionist in its style; ancestral in its thematic and symbolist and fauvist in the use of color. His proposal nourishes itself from the inclusion of popular, folkloric, archaeological, past and historic-artistic themes”
Susan Rocha 2004. Quito, Ecuador.