Roy Kill

NUMBER Three
Robert karl illiovÁri
Roy Kill
‍‘The Bearable Being
of Lightness’
from sunday 16.03 —⁠ 03.05

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Robert Karl Illiovári, known under the pseudonym Roy Kill, is a Swiss-Bulgarian painter and draughtsman who moves through the world as both witness and fugitive, lingering where opulence meets oblivion. A restless observer of the exquisite debris of the beau monde, he drifts through Zurich, Monaco, Palm Springs, and Medellín’s most rarefied enclaves, never quite belonging. His chosen subjects speak not of what is permanent, but of what is destined to vanish.

Roy Kill’s oeuvre captures the essence of superficiality, wrenching it from its deepest roots and laying it bare on canvas and paper. Rejecting all pretence of profundity, he has no interest in depth, only in the echoes of surfaces—an aesthetician of the void, a chronicler of gloss. His work elevates ephemerality to the status of permanence, treating the fleeting not as something to mourn but as the only enduring truth worth preserving. Both decadent and incisive, it is an homage to the beautiful ugliness of our impermanent minds and world.

Though quite active in the 1970s, Roy Kill never sought the stage, avoiding both the critical spotlight and the gravitational pull of fame. His sudden disappearance from the scene only deepened the mystery—was he too close to discovery, too disinterested to seize it? Or was he hiding something, a man who walked the thin line between observer and voyeur, capturing the world with a gaze that is both detached and intimate?

What we do know is this: he never stopped drawing. His tools—ink, brushes, and a pocketful of pencils—always within reach, ready to commit a moment to paper before it dissolves into memory. He does not refine; he does not reconsider. The first stroke remains, uncorrected, unrepentant. His surfaces become immediate sites of execution, each piece spontaneous, unburdened by hesitation, untouched by regret.
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