“I Love You This Much” reads a message inscribed on the base of a sculpture of a tiny man. He stretches his small arms out as far as they can reach. With a stack of upside-down tables balanced precariously on his head, he is a simpering caricature of Atlas, the Greek titan who carried the weight of the heavens on his shoulders.

“It’s meant to have this sense of humour,” says artist Nadia Belerique, who cast the aluminum sculpture from a kitschy tip jar she found in a second-hand store. Eight of the figures act as a central supporting element in her sculpture I Love You This Much, which she placed at the heart of her solo exhibition at Toronto’s Daniel Faria Gallery this summer, also titled I Love You This Much. Never one to take something at face value, Belerique demands specificity. “Like, how much?” she asks of the miniature’s proclamation. “What is ‘this’?”

At the same time, in a different place—The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario—Belerique’s husband, artist Tony Romano, also set a group of diminutive figures to work. In a solo exhibition titled The Big Hat, Romano assembled a group of kinetic sculptures whose designs are based on whirligigs, the moving objects frequently seen on farms in the form of weather vanes, pinwheels, or figures performing tasks such as chopping wood. In an accompanying film, Romano tells a Marxist fairy tale about labour and exploitation in which the wind-powered whirligigs, seduced by a man wearing a big hat, enter a Faustian bargain that sees them forgo their simple ways in exchange for empty promises of riches.

Installation View, Nadia Belerique, I Love You This Much at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. June 6-July 20, 2024. Photo: LF Documentation.

Both artists seem to be caught up in a moment of tension and vulnerability. Cautiously, suspiciously, they wonder: How much is too much? How much is enough? What is worth sacrificing in the pursuit of achieving our dreams? And is there adequate support in place to keep our world from falling?

Married since 2017, and friends for many years before that, Belerique and Romano are each other’s cheerleaders and champions. Interviewed at their farmhouse in Warkworth, Ontario, they often answered questions about themselves with glowing praise of the other. Because it was nearly impossible to sit down with them both simultaneously, this provided a helpful insight into the nature of their dynamic.

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Together they run a household, manage 26 acres of farmland (also home to seven chickens and Mona the dog), frequently host friends, and raise their three-year-old daughter, Isola. There’s only one thing they haven’t yet done as a duo: make art.

 

It’s not that they haven’t given it a go. In spring 2024, Madeleine Taurins, director of Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, which has long represented Belerique, invited the couple to participate in In Concert, a group exhibition whose theme was collaboration. “In order to do it, we were trying to make the piece in an exquisite corpse kind of way,” Belerique says, referencing the game invented by the surrealists in which one artist starts drawing their line where another has left off. “That’s the way we’ve had to approach both of our practices, and even the home,” Romano adds. “We take over for each other in this back and forth, because we’re not often in the same physical space doing things at the same exact time. Our attention is often fractured—we have to constantly focus on child care and all this stuff.” Belerique continues, “We didn’t end up putting a piece in the show,” but “the seed was planted,” she says of the idea to collaborate. “We’re interested in doing it. It just might happen in another way.” In their distinct artistic practices, neither has shied away from working with others. “It’s weird,” Romano says. “I don’t do it now, but throughout my whole career, I’ve always collaborated.”

Installation View, Nadia Belerique, Central Casting at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. June 6-July 20, 2024. Photo: LF Documentation.

Installation View, Nadia Belerique, House at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. June 6-July 20, 2024. Photo: LF Documentation.

Romano grew up in Whitby, Ontario, and started working at his Italian immigrant father’s railing company in Oshawa as a youth, returning every summer while earning his BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver. He now runs the company, leaving home every weekday at dawn and driving back in time for dinner. “It’s where I started thinking about art, thinking about materials,” Romano says of the shop. “I always come back to it. My woodworking, it’s always mimicking these shapes that I used to see as a kid, actually, these abstractions of the body. So it’s always been like my studio, my fabrication shop.”

As an artist, Romano has collaborated with Tyler Brett (under the moniker T&T), Maura Doyle (as G.L.N.), Corin Sworn (on the 2016 film La Giubba), and others; made music in the band Deloro; and published art magazines with Claire Greenshaw (Millions) and Jay Isaac (Hunter & Cook). It’s “kind of spiritual,” he says of the moment when people working together creatively “figure out how to make this magical thing happen.”

Belerique is also part of a tight-knit community of visual artists whose practices have intersected with her own, among them Lili Huston-Herterich, Lotus Kang, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Jennifer Sciarrino, Jenine Marsh, Karen Craven, and Danielle Greer. Like Romano, Belerique also grew up in the Ontario suburbs in a working-class immigrant family. Her parents moved to Mississauga in the 1970s from the Azores and brought the archipelago’s unique brand of Catholic mysticism with them (a topic Belerique is currently exploring as she prepares to participate in Walk&Talk, the art biennial taking place in Portugal next summer).
She ended up at York University, thinking she might become a teacher, not knowing that the path to become an artist was even an option. Then, “I took photography, and I fell in love with it,” she says. “It was the first time I was like, Oh, I could say something with this medium.”

Installation View, Tony Romano, Not Here, Not There, at Franz Kaka, Toronto. May 31-July 13, 2024. Photo: LF Documentation.

It was at York that Belerique met Daniel Faria, who was her TA at the time. “Nadia is an incredible personality and charismatic. You can’t help but be drawn into her world,” says Faria, who has long represented her. “Her practice has this sense of humour and nostalgia. It is playful in terms of concept but also material. Personally, we’re both kids of Portuguese immigrants from the ’burbs. I remember a photograph that she took of a chandelier in a living room that was the chandelier in every single suburban Portuguese home. So I just kind of got it right away, and then you add her unique take on things. I was just hooked,” he says.

At 30, Belerique went to the University of Guelph for her MFA and upon graduation exhibited Have You Seen This Man at Daniel Faria, an installation consisting of steel sculptures of silhouetted people, a white rug covered in bootprints, and photographs smudged by sticky fingers. It was a pivotal show for Belerique, displaying her laconic wit, flickers of drama, mastery of scale and perception, and as Momus editor Sky Goodden wrote in a 2018 review of her Oakville Galleries exhibition The Weather Channel, an ability to “make a symbol personal, and the personal mythological.”

Artist Nadia Belerique

I Love You This Much is Belerique’s first major show at Daniel Faria since becoming a mother. Of the table sculpture, Taurins says, “She had referred to it as a kind of self-portrait.” As Taurins points out, the table on the bottom layer “is missing its centre. That image of something being removed or taken out in order to support the rest, in order to expand, has so many links to motherhood or other systems of caretaking.”

Becoming a parent has clearly influenced Romano’s artwork, too, with The Big Hat centring on a children’s fable, and the animated film The Arrow—part of his exhibition Not Here, Not There which ran earlier this year at Franz Kaka in Toronto—about a cartoon stork. Not Here, Not There also featured a series of colourful metal-railing sculptures modelled on piss guards, an expression of Romano’s continued interest in disciplinary architecture, the arbitrariness of borders, and the history of migration. (This concern is also shared by Belerique: see Holdings, 2020–ongoing, her series of shipping barrels.)

Romano’s recent series No Mercy, featured a collection of found chairs with carved undersides depicting lewd activities, based on medieval-era misericords. They’re exhibited tipped over, legs splayed, “almost like someone’s bending over and showing their asshole,” Romano says.

Artist Tony Romano

“He’s a very thoughtful person and a very thoughtful artist,” Aryen Hoekstra, director of Franz Kaka, says of Romano. “He has this incredible material dexterity and skill at working with different materials, whether they’re found or fabricated.”

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Of the chairs Romano rescued from roadsides, Hoekstra says, “He felt this affection toward them and would pick them up and give them this new life. That sense of care and object sensitivity is something that applies to his practice more broadly as well.”

 

In the couple’s warm and considered home, every light fixture, tile, table, and plant stand is a testament to their shared artistic vision and acumen. They designed and fabricated a lot of their furniture themselves. Their large dining table was a gift from Romano to Belerique when they first started dating, and a stained-glass work by Belerique is installed on a wall. They carved out apertures for additional windows wherever they could.

Seeing the property in its current state of polish, you would never guess the condition it was in when they purchased it in 2018. “It was, like, fields of old fridges and bicycles,” Romano says. Now those fields grow spaghetti squash, zucchini, cabbage, and tomatoes.

Past Isola’s outdoor playhouse—an actual small house not too different in size from some Toronto studio apartments—is a barn where Romano does his wood carving and Belerique makes her doors. Past the barn is a sitting area the couple refers to as “the restaurant” (“It’s called Nightshades,” Belerique says). And past the restaurant is the couple’s shared studio, whose footprint is even larger than their house.

While their artistic practices often trade in similar themes, their visual styles diverge greatly, with Romano tending toward maximalism and Belerique toward minimalism. In life and in art, they are able to balance the other and provide encouragement.

“In the last five years we have each experienced a crisis of identity,” Belerique says, referring to the new roles they are parsing––as parents, country dwellers, and artists interpreting a world transformed by the pandemic and political unrest. “It’s been crucial to have the other person holding the other’s hand during that, to put things into perspective, because we do have the exact same goals.” When I ask what those goals are, they are in instant agreement. “To keep making art,” Belerique says simply. “Yeah, to live a life surrounded by art,” Romano adds. “Both of us want to sustain a practice for as long as we can,” Belerique explains. “That’s basically our goal—to show again, to show again, to show again, to show again, to just have creative projects happening.”

Eventually, they may use the property to launch an artist residency or gallery. Belerique shares that whatever shape this future project takes, they’ll call it “Family Business.” That venture will be separate from the farm, however, which has a different name. It’s called Top Love Farm, she tells me coyly. “Because Tony and I have the top love.”

The work may still be in progress, but you can already envision its didactic panel: Nadia Belerique and Tony Romano, Top Love Farm, 2019–ongoing. Mixed media (windows, walls, plants, tools, calendar notifications, a child napping on a sofa, a dream shared, a promise kept, a lifelong collaboration).

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