Carrefour is pleased to present a selection of video and sculptural works produced between 2022 and 2024 by Ontario-based artist Tony Romano. The exhibition takes its title from the history of a word and the various mutations of its meaning. Originally derived from the Latin patientia, rooted in the verb pati (“to suffer”), which also gave us “passion”, patience was a virtue of stoic endurance in the face of adversity, reaching its peak during the Christian period. Its meaning now seems to have drifted toward a kind of boring inefficiency; within accelerated systems, it appears as a friction, a limitation, or even an incapacity.

Romano treats structure, both physical and conceptual, as malleable, subject to dismantling and reconfiguration. A series of chairs (No Mercy, 2022) draws inspiration from a curious medieval practice: the carving of Misericords, also called Patience in French, wooden ledges attached to the tops of folded church seats, designed to alleviate the strain of standing for long periods of prayer. The apprentices charged with ornamenting these hidden surfaces tended toward the secular and the pagan, in direct opposition to the sacred iconography surrounding them. Romano reactivates this lineage through found chairs rescued from roadsides, carved on their undersides, and presented overturned, les jambes en l’air. These sculptures offer a strange reinterpretation of familiar objects in Montreal, where Catholic iconography appears everywhere: our buildings are adorned with gargoyles, and the kitchens of our once-affordable apartments are filled with mismatched colonial chairs, often discarded.

Romano grew up in Whitby, Ontario, working in his father’s railing company in Oshawa, a site that remains central to his practice. His daily return to the workshop anchors a sustained engagement with materials, process, and repetition. This grounding in labor informs a practice in which making is neither concealed nor optimized but deliberately exposed.

A video work extends this logic into moving images. The Arrow (2024) presents a looping animated narrative of a stork pierced mid-flight, rendered in the language of children’s animation, staging an immediate dissonance between innocence and violence. The piece centers on the Pfeilstorch, a white stork discovered in Germany in 1822 with a Central African arrow still embedded in its neck, the first concrete proof that birds migrate rather than hibernate. The video’s naive visual register carries a narrative of colonial borders, scientific extrapolation, and the futility of life, ending, as it must, with hunters finishing what the arrow started, after all the bird’s perseverance. Working within a reflexive tradition, Romano lays bare the mechanisms by which authority lodges itself inside cultural storytelling. The artist’s hand can be seen working through the images, foregrounding the tedious labor involved. Patience is a human constraint, a kind of friction that doesn’t align with machinic speed, where results appear to emerge from nowhere. To erase the process of making is to produce something hollow. Everything is important; I’m highlighting the whole book.