People Pleaser: Boris Torres

We are excited to announce the participation of KATES-FERRI PROJECTS at the fourth edition of SPARK Art Fair Vienna, taking place from March 20 – 23, 2025, in the prestigious MARX HALLE in Vienna.

This is our second participation at SPARK, and we are proud to present a solo exhibition by Boris Torres titled “People Pleaser” located at booth #E13.

With prying eyes, People Pleaser invites you to enter a world of unsuspecting characters, some unaware of our presence and others caught in the act. These new paintings are reactions to the aesthetic and stimulation of dance, film, and photography. “I spent my early childhood in a small town in Ecuador without exposure to art except for the vivid and startling paintings I encountered during services at the local Catholic church,” comments Torres. “There was also one movie theater, and there I was introduced to films from all over the world, including 70's Kung-fu, European art-cinema, Italian horror, and the movies of pre-code Hollywood (Tarzan, particularly, enticed me). I was seduced by the images in front of me, little by little discovering that moving pictures were like the paintings I’d seen in the church, careful compositions within their frames that tell a story with ambience, mood, and characters. These new paintings recreate the visceral stimulation of those early experiences, stirring voyeuristic desires and creating narratives through lush paint strokes of light, color, and flesh.”

Artist Statement:

My love of making art and drawing are my earliest memories. Before my adolescence, my mother and I immigrated from Ecuador to the U.S. for a better life. In the NYC public schools, I struggled academically, but I was lucky to cross paths with teachers who saw artistic talent in me and encouraged me to pursue it. In those art classes I developed an artistic practice that led me to attend a specialized Art High School where I excelled. I’m a NYC artist through and through, still, I felt like an outsider because in the early 90s, I was gay, an immigrant, and an artist who created queer images - a taboo during a time of deep homophobia and death from AIDS.  But in the underbelly of Manhattan, I found a community of artists, immigrants, and queer people, who mirrored my experiences. In those worlds, I was given license to make the kind of work that still feels forbidden and exciting for me. My heroes are artists who seldom separated their work from their lives, such as Alice Neel, Joe Brainard and Patrick Angus. Their work inspires me, as does sex, cinema, photography, New York City and the people around me.

Bio:

Boris Torres (b. 1976, Ecuador) received his MFA in Fine Art from Brooklyn College and his BA from Parsons School of Design.  A 2019 recipient of the Leslie Lohman Museum Fellowship, as well as an Artist Resident at Virginia Center for the Arts, Torres’s work has been part of numerous museum and group shows, including the Bronx Museum of Art, Museo Muñoz Marino, La Petite Mort Gallery, Tacoma Art Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Prinz Eisenherz, and Cheim & Read. His work has also been featured in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Out Magazine and in films and television including Keep the Lights On, Love Is Strange, American Horror Story and All the Murders in the Building.

Mr. Torres is represented by Kates-Ferri Projects, NYC.KATES-FERRI PROJECTS

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Video of exhibition on YouTube