ARTISTS NIL AND KARIN ROMANO
Creating together with harmony and completing each other, they work primarily with acrylic & oil paint on large canvas surfaces as well as black and white works using pen or ink on paper. The twins are from and are based in Tel Aviv.
For the artists, each work is an opportunity to narrate a story of their inner world. Their interest revolves around the complexity of the human soul and they communicate these notions through motifs such as chaos, ritualism and nihilism. They explain that such ideas resulted from a long period of depression and, therefore, of isolation from society.
Being introverts by nature, we found in art a way to communicate our messages to the world. Our style is intense, ritualistic and cult-like, dealing with beliefs, religion, the occult, symbolism, queer relationships, magic and much more. Conceptually our art is very feminine. Sometimes we paint ourselves in intimate situations regarding the twin bond we share. Thematically most of our work is focused on an intense relationship and bondage between individuals who try to survive and exist in a chaotic, destructive and threatening world.”
Tell us about your greatest inspirations or influences?
We've been isolating a lot together from society so we had the time to enrich our inner worlds with a lot of culture such as cinema, art philosophy, music psychology and poetry. Our greatest source of inspiration comes from mostly chaotic films, from directors such as: Hanke, Maya Darren, Lyne Ramsy Xavier Dolan, Chantel Akerman, Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Wong kar wai, Sofia Copolla, Cronenberg, Agnes Varda, Hanke, Bong Joon Ho and music figures from different subcultures such as: Blixa, current 93, Diamanda Galas Soap and skin, and many others.We have a soft spot for movies that make us feel intense emotions and music that makes us feel melancholy.
Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin are also great inspiration & expressionists such as : Otto dix, George Grotz and painters from the Weimar era. The fragility of human existence has always had a great impact on our aesthetics, that is why we appreciate the modern German art in the Weimar Republic. Perfection is boring in our eyes. Our closest friends also greatly inspire us, they encouraged us to create a series of drawings exploring their worlds, and we’d like to also add that we really love piano.
Tell us a bit about your creative process?
Before we start to paint we sit together and brainstorm. After we immediately create sketches where we try to combine both of our ideas. Then we start working diligently several days until we accomplish the painting, a four hand monster. On our black and white paintings that require an extremely high level of concentration we are extremely calculating on designing the intricacies of the motifs and shapes. With our colourful paintings we let ourselves go more intuitively. We work equally and we come up with new techniques together, which is our favorite part.
How has the pandemic affected your creativity and how do you see the world changing?
We are pessimists by birth so the pandemic did not particularly surprise us. We are lone wolves so it felt that we had the right tools to cope in such times. We have to admit we felt even more belong to the world in such time since we are outsiders so we felt now people can understand us better, be in our shoes and experience loneliness in big doses, or mental pain. Perhaps we’ve felt more understood.
These years has been for us the most creative and developmentally meaningful because we have worked hard on an important exhibition at the Janco Dada Museum.
How the world is changing, well we’d say clearly the power of digital media intensified during the turbulent period and it feels that people have changed a bit and started to connect to their inner selves. We feel it seems a lot of people are learning to appreciate the small but more important things in life.
Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?
Wong kar wai , David Lynch ,PJ Harvey, Diamanda Galas ,Nicole Eisenman ,Salman Toor, Yayoi Kusama...A good artist should not only entertain but should have something to say.
What was the journey into the art world like for you?
As children we were always creative and thinking out of the box, it was always there inside of us, waiting for the right moment to explode. We believe that some people are born to be artists and we think this is the case with us, we feel it's our duty for the world and our destiny. Creation burns inside us like flames. Through art we discovered we have a place in the world, and a place we belong. Art for us is our therapist, our closes friend, our oxygen. When we don’t create we tilt like flowers who don’t get their water.