Between Silence and Sound: Searching for Inspiration in Paint, Chess, and Rui Massena’s Music
An intimate reflection on artistic doubt and resilience. Gus Romano shares his struggle to find inspiration, his strange refuge in chess, and the portrait he painted of maestro Rui Massena, inspired by piano melodies and the legacy of Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Letters of Gus Romano
Since July 2025, I have been writing what I call my Letters. They are not essays, nor polished reflections, but fragments of my inner life as an artist — thoughts written in the raw, as if to a friend, like Van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo.
I began these Letters because I realized painting alone cannot hold all that I feel. Sometimes the silence of the studio needs words. In them, I write about doubt, joy, fear, inspiration, exhaustion, and the fragile balance between my work as an artist and my life outside it.
The Letters are dated, imperfect, and deliberately personal. They are not meant to be instructions or manifestos. They are simply traces — records of what it means to search for truth in painting in the 21st century.
Whether anyone reads them now is less important than the fact that they exist. One day, perhaps, they will help explain not only my art, but also the time I lived in, and the questions that guided me.
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