10 Questions with Daniela Romero
Daniela Romero is a Mexican visual artist, creative director, and illustrator.
Her work stems from a desire to understand what one feels. She doesn't seek to communicate or explain, but rather to transform the emotions that inhabit the everyday into something new: an image that breathes and exists on its own.
In her practice, creation is not an act of representation, but of discovery. A way of giving voice to what is yet to be named. Because, in the end, what hasn't been said also seeks to be seen.
She has participated in group exhibitions at Galería OLARTE, Galería Tándem, Galería IDEWO, Festival Collage, and the Yolotl Interdisciplinary Artistic Circle, among others. In 2024, her piece A la vuelta de Reforma received an honourable mention in the Citizen Art Competition: La Ciudad en Movimiento (The City in Motion), and in February 2025, she presented her first solo exhibition, Cuentos Chinos (Chinese Tales), at The Gallery Condesa, in collaboration with IDEWO Design Gallery.
Daniela Romero - Portrait
ARTIST STATEMENT
What remains unspoken also seeks to be seen. There are images born from chaos, others from tenderness, yet all are united by a drive to reveal what hurts, what pulses beneath the surface, and what remains hidden.
Daniela Romero's artistic practice arises from the need to translate emotional experiences, such as grief, obsession, memory, identity, or renewal, into visual form. Rather than conveying linear narratives, her work manifests as visual expressions born from inner impulse and intuitive detail, giving shape to the nuanced processes that define the human condition.
Romero employs mixed media techniques that blend analogue and digital processes, integrating materials according to what each piece needs to express, whether it's the symbolic, the contradictory, the transformative, or the enduring. She creates limited series and unique works that invite introspection: mirrors that can be unsettling or comforting, sometimes kitsch, sometimes poetic. In this intersection of the personal and the collective, she constructs universes where viewers are able to recognise themselves or reinterpret meaning from their own experience.
Mas Alla De La Cerca, 27x20 cm, 2025 © Daniela Romero
INTERVIEW
First of all, how did your background in advertising and creative direction influence your current work as a visual artist and illustrator?
My experience in advertising and creative direction shaped me as much as it challenged me. I learned to craft images that communicate with clarity, to think visually through emotion, and to understand how a message can resonate with others. Yet, it was also the space where I encountered a deep frustration: creating to explain and persuade from someone else’s perspective.
More than inspiring me, that experience helped me acknowledge a need I had been postponing, the need to express my own truth, to speak from my perspective without having to translate myself. That discomfort became the driving force that led me to seek new paths, to cease communicating for others and begin expressing myself personally.
Perhaps I was idealistic in seeking freedom within the commercial world, but that journey also brought clarity. It allowed me to grasp the distinctions and intersections between being a graphic designer, an illustrator, and an artist. Today, I recognise it all as part of the same journey: one moving from craft to soul, from strategy to emotion.
What first inspired you to move from the commercial world into more personal artistic expression?
More than inspiration, it was curiosity and necessity. At one point, I wanted to dedicate myself entirely to illustration, but since I didn’t have commissions, I began inventing personal projects just to keep creating. Through that process, I discovered something essential: I could say much more when I wasn’t working to fulfil an external objective.
That freedom led me to experiment with digital works and, little by little, to return to analogue mediums, collage, watercolour, acrylic, seeking to reconnect with the gesture, the tangible, the flawed. That’s how I realised my work was not only about communication, but about revealing my own uniqueness, tearing down the signs and meanings I had learned in order to create new languages. That was when illustration became art: a space to discover myself and reinvent my way of seeing.
Caos-interno, 50x65 cm, 2025 © Daniela Romero
En Rumbo, 80x50 cm, 2025 © Daniela Romero
Your art often explores emotion and inner experience. How do you translate feelings like grief or renewal into visual form?
I don’t aim to represent feelings literally; I let them transform. Pain, for instance, becomes a crack, a broken figure, a texture repeated until it wears thin. Renewal, on the other hand, appears as light, colour, or openness, like a space that breathes amid chaos.
This is where technique becomes an essential part of expression. In collage, for example, the fragments are like pieces of memory that I reassemble from my own perspective. Cutting, joining, layering, it all becomes a way of reconstructing myself. Each material brings its own energy and story, and when combined, emotions take on substance.
I also work with symbols, reinterpreting them through both their cultural meaning and my own. I’m fascinated by how an image can shift in significance when filtered through my gaze, how something familiar can turn both intimate and new at the same time. In that dialogue between technique and emotion, destruction and reconstruction, I find the strength of my visual language.
Can you describe your creative process? How does a piece usually begin and develop?
My process almost always begins with a need: I want to say something, but I don’t yet know how. That not knowing becomes the starting point. I ask myself what it is I really want to express, and in that state of searching, I begin to notice everything more closely. Anything, a conversation, a song, a phrase or a casual image, can become a clue. I gather fragments, ideas, stray emotions, until the moment comes when I need to sit down and create.
Once I’m in the process, I sketch, mix materials, and experiment with combinations. Sometimes I remember a piece of paper I saved, a texture I want to include, or I think of another technique that might give the message more weight. Every choice is intuitive, yet directed by what I want to understand or discover.
There’s a moment when the piece appears finished, but sometimes, after looking at it, I feel the urge to add something more. Still, I’ve learned to stop myself. I realised that stopping is also part of the process: letting the piece exist as far as it needs to, and continuing the exploration in the next one. Each creation leaves me with an open question that finds its answer in the next.
Testigo silencioso, 21x28 cm, 2025 © Daniela Romero
You use both analogue and digital techniques. How do you decide which materials or methods to combine for each work?
The choice of materials emerges intuitively, as an extension of the creative process. Collage is the starting point: it allows me to build from fragments, to join pieces that come from different places and give them new meaning. From there, I useother materials, like paint or graphic elements, to create textures, contrasts, or depths that amplify the emotion of the piece.
Sometimes I begin with analogue methods and then add digital interventions; other times, I start digitally and return to the physical. I’m drawn to that movement between the tangible and the virtual, where each stage transforms the one before. Even the physical frame has begun to be part of my exploration: I see it as an extension of the artwork, a tangible element that helps reinforce its uniqueness and complete its visual universe.
There’s no set method. Each piece leads me to the materials or techniques it needs. What matters is staying open, letting the process reveal its own logic, and allowing the combination of elements to retain its honesty.
What ideas or emotions do you hope viewers connect with when they see your art?
At first, I worried whether anyone would understand what I wanted to say. I felt my work was too personal, and that maybe it wouldn’t connect with anyone. But over time, and through exhibitions, I discovered something very different: people always find their own interpretations.
Sometimes they surprise me with completely different readings, and other times they resonate with the emotion that drove me to create, though in different settings or characters. I appreciate that freedom. I no longer think of connection as an objective, but as a natural outcome.
Now I understand that each piece has its own voice, and that once it goes out into the world, it no longer belongs to me. My role ends when I finish the work; what happens afterwards is part of the image’s life, not mine.
Your solo exhibition Cuentos Chinos marked an important moment in your career. What was the concept behind it?
The central concept of Cuentos Chinos was the perception of reality. The series brings together romantic and ironic stories that say one thing but show another, just like in any human relationship, where two people can live through the same story and still tell it in completely different ways. I was interested in exploring that contrast between what is said and what is felt, between appearance and truth.
Collage became the perfect language for that idea. They are pieces of memory joined together to construct a possible version of events, a fragmented truth. Each work is an incomplete story, a partial gaze that invites us to reflect on how many realities can coexist within a single experience.
After that series of fourteen pieces, I delved deeper into collage and realised it had been with me since childhood. I remembered how much I enjoyed making collages for school projects. Rediscovering it felt like returning to something essential. Today, it’s a technique I don’t want to set aside, because I’m fascinated by its ability to bring together fragments, contradictions, and memories in a single gesture.
Un buzo caperuzo, 150x65 cm, 2024 © Daniela Romero
Ahora Si Va la de a Deveras, 70x55 cm, 2025 © Daniela Romero
You mentioned that your works act as “mirrors” for viewers. What does that mean to you?
At first, I liked to think of my works as mirrors, pieces that invited people to look inward and find themselves. But over time, I realised I don’t need to think about that while I’m creating. I no longer make the pieces hoping someone will see their reflection in them; I make them because I need to understand something that lives within me.
If later someone recognises themselves, feels moved, or interprets the work through their own story, I find that beautiful, but it’s not the starting point. I used to seek dialogue; now I seek truth, even if it’s only my own. It may sound self-centred, but to me it’s a way of being honest: not creating to please or to connect, but to stay true to what I need to express. Everything else happens on its own.
How do you balance the personal and the collective aspects in your artistic practice?
For me, there’s no separation between the personal and the artistic. I create from what I feel, from the need to understand myself, and that’s why, at first, showing my work was difficult; I felt I was exposing myself completely.
Over time, I realised that even if I don’t aim to connect, emotions aren’t exclusive. What is born from my experience can resonate in other bodies, in other stories. Perhaps that’s where the balance lies: in accepting that what is intimate can also be shared, without ceasing to be mine.
And without intending it, the collective always finds its way in. My culture is present in my visual decisions, in colour, ornamentation, and saturation. All of that belongs to me as much as it transcends me. In that way, my inner world and the world around me end up in dialogue, naturally and unforced.
Lastly, what are you working on now, and what directions do you hope to explore in the future?
Right now, I’m working on a series of collages based on repetition, as an attempt to find calm within my own neurosis.They are compositions full of noise, where shapes and fragments seem to argue with each other. I’m drawn to that internal struggle, that constant contradiction between chaos and the search for balance.
The figures in the works are positioned in yoga poses, a kind of visual metaphor for this contradiction: bodies at rest containing a mind in motion. It’s my way of inhabiting silence, or at least of trying to.
The series is inspired by the poem “Poema 8 (Yo no tengo una personalidad; yo soy…)” from Oliverio Girondo’s Espantapájaros (1932), especially the passage that says:
“…I prefer to give up everything and let them tire themselves out arguing about what to do with me, so that at least I can take the satisfaction of telling them all to hell with it together.”
That line struck me deeply. It speaks to letting go of the attempt to organise the many voices that inhabit us. I think, at heart, that’s what I’m pursuing with this series: not silencing them, but allowing them to coexist until they find their own silence.
Artist’s Talk
Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.
