Alicia Torres

Infinite void, constant transmutation

Alicia Torres (Valencia-1993)

Entering the work of Alicia Torres is a one-way trip from which you never return the same. A perceptual experience whose starting point transmits ideas and concepts such as beauty, or the sublime at its most aesthetic level: sculptures with volumes, sinuous, almost erotic shapes and polished textures that challenge the viewer, focusing on the outside rather than on what they contain, and that can be traversed, touched, and heard with the gaze. For this reason, in some of these pieces, the passage of water reminds us of the eternal return to the embryo of time, cyclical but changing.

Like its golden plates, in which oxidation underlines the life they contain. Or his textiles in which the digital printing of the forms generated naturally in the sheets, speak to us of the possibility of navigating between the real and the represented. Gold, the eternal reference of the divine, and chemical resin, the product of sometimes risky human ingenuity, embrace and talk about the fruitful possibilities of the interaction between different: natural and artificial, ephemeral and perpetual ...

Alicia creates living pieces that go through different states, generating works that are not only unique in terms of reproducibility, but also changeable over time. Every moment they are mutating and moving towards new topographies that could well be wheat fields from a bird's eye view. Alive in their apparent immobility, like the growth of grass, ever changing from flat to deep, when explored from a courageous perspective.

For this reason, already on the exterior facade of the gallery we find Landscape Ptherestico, inviting the public to enter the immersive experience that is Empty Infinito, Transmutedn Constante. Alicia imagines and materializes dreamlike shapes and landscapes, as artificial as possible and makes them available to us so that they continue to grow, while the passage of time leaves its own mark, underlining that nothing is static or immovable, much less isolated.

Mieke Bal wrote in Endless Andness: The Politics of Abstraction According to Ann Veronica Janssens that "neither the artist nor the critic dictate the experience" is the public, who sees their subjectivity and sensitivity reflected in the artistic work. And in the work of Alicia Torres this happens in an accentuated way and full of vitality. Alicia turns the interior space of Shiras Galería in a living being, in which the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. A constellation of pieces ranging from the pictorial (Ówater rust, Óxido Paper) to the sculptural through forms, reflections and transparencies (Óxido Plástico). In the case of the work Mirador, this draws and contains the space with gold and fine lines that allow the public to build their own story while they walk inside. In a similar way, the water runs through and embraces some of his sculptures, recreating sounds of distant gardens that bathe the whole exhibition with soundscapes, highlighting in a whisper the old Heraclitus and his eternal everything flows, nothing remains.

Empty Infinito, Transmutedn Constant contains tensions concealed by a golden patina that envelop, and weave (Discontinuous Textile Y Continuous Textile) reliefs, geometries and materials, to talk about the infinite transformation as the only constant, of the ephemeral, of the passage of time and of how to travel through it through the senses, the aesthetic and collective experience, to invent meeting places, landscapes imagined and imaginable from which to continue inhabiting the void.

According to the French philosopher Raymon Ruyer “the vital space of every human being, even of every living being, has an axiological relief, a non-geometric dimension that gives it a non-material depth, a dimension of the important, the serious. […] Affectivity is the confused perception of this dimension, of this depth ”. And, in short, the world imagined by Alicia Torres is a kind invitation to look at ourselves and answer our own questions about what the landscape is, what is its essence and, above all, where it ends, even more, if possible. the landscape without a look that reaffirms it. While the different materials caress us inside, they oxidize preconceived concepts to give light and place to new ideas that arise from physical and sensory experience, to settle inside us and give us a transformed image of who we are and what we inhabit. Pleasant experience for the intermingled senses and deep reflections on our place in the world and its changing and, at the same time, eternal rhythms.

Guillermo Moreno Mirallas