Crawling Through Glass by Armando Román - Riso Print

Crawling Through Glass
by Armando Román
10.25"x16" Risograph Print

A kaleidoscopic meditation on faith, struggle, and survival, Crawling Through Glass layers vibrant riso textures over a patchwork of pattern and color. At its center, a figure crawls beneath a framed image of La Virgen de Guadalupe, their camo-clad body and red boots suspended in a tension between devotion and endurance.

Román’s work fuses pop vibrancy with deep cultural resonance, transforming the act of crawling into a gesture of resilience and ritual. Printed in lush, overlapping colors on warm, uncoated paper, each 11x17 print captures the tactile richness of riso ink and the artist’s hand-drawn mark-making.

Armando Román is a Chicago-based artist who creates works on paper combining digital brushstrokes with physical marks from crayons, colored pencils, and pastels. The Mexican landscape, both cultural and literal, intrigues him, reflecting both a familiarity and foreignness due to his familial history. His compositions explore the relationship between border and center, using colors and patterns informed by Mexican folk art. Roman's art intertwines religious motifs and queer aesthetics, creating works that reflect an interest in both euphoric belonging and dysphoric rejection, embodying the double bind of pleasure and pain in his identity as a queer religious person.