KATES-FERRI PROJECTS presents INSIDE & OUT, a duo presentation of paintings by Ecuadorian artists, Stephano Espinoza Galarza and Boris Torres. On view at MECA International Art Fair at Casa Palma, Ciudad Colonial, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana, Booth M7 from March 16th to March 19th with a VIP Collectors’ reception on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 from 6-9pm.

A series of oil paintings by Torres depicts intimate views of people in their inner sanctum, their private spaces. Espinoza introduces paintings of New Haven strip malls made from his car during the pandemic. What’s considered inside and outside could seem visually obvious in Espinoza and Torres’s work, but the artists subvert these expectations and push viewers to see and feel beyond the surface.  

Torres paints his figures in various states of undress, conversation, or caress. The room is sometimes filled with light, while others are steeped in velvety richness with just edges of objects humming in the dark. Enveloped by their thoughts and situation, these individuals are immersed in their own world. Viewers are outside of their attention and observation. Creating these enclosures filled with emotions, Torres builds the unspoken tension within each scene. 

With all that visual evidence, superficially, one could consider Torres’s 11” x 14” paintings as the presumed “inside.” The imagery, after all, is of interiors and of people at their most vulnerable. However, as Torres reveals in his titles, he references stills from films, including 1980s French cinema, like “Passion” and “A Wounded Man.” Although it does not take away from the intimacy in the frame, these snapshots between characters are constructed and produced, just as Torres’s paintings are also constructed by his sensitive hands and mind. He surprises viewers with this revelation, which disrupts their belief of a private encounter as the work suggests. He pushes the scene into a forum, making it public. 

The suburban landscapes in Espinoza’s series are decidedly outdoors. Growing up in Tampa, Florida, the artist spent a lot of time in strip malls and their parking lots as a teenager. Barnes and Nobel was a place where he could safely read queer erotica by switching the book’s dust jacket and the parking lot served as a convenient meeting spot for craigslist hookups. So, when he got COVID in the spring of 2022, he set out to isolate and recapture that lustful young man’s gaze. Through this new exterior series that continued into 2023, the trips to suburban malls generate dreamy studies of places he frequents when needing to reconnect with the anonymous affect of suburbia.

Painting on 8 x 10 in. panels and canvas from inside the car, Espinoza thinks of the first times he helped his mother navigate the Florida highways when they moved to the US. Reviving this moment points to the significance of his interiority to this body of work. The crux of the practice surrounds driving through the lots until he finds the perfect perspective of his subject. His loose brushwork gently destabilizes the outlet mall structures in the compositions. Creating this surreal effect, Espinoza takes viewers into his mind rather than just the observable physical world we inhabit.  

Both artists engage with the inside and outside. Neither theme takes precedence over the other. Torres’s painting portrays intimacy, warmth, and depth, just as films provoke intense emotions. Espinoza imbues his work with melancholy and nostalgia, rendering the architecture in his paintings surreal and mirage-like. He blurs the line between reality and one’s memory of a place as if they are dreams that one can't quite hold on to. With the work of these two artists, INSIDE & OUT invites investigation of automatic assumptions and transmits deep feelings.

Stephano Espinoza Galarza: (b. 1992, Ecuador) is a visual artist who has developed his work between Ecuador and the United States. He studied fine arts for a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and later earned a BA in social and cultural analysis with concentrations in Latinx and metropolitan studies from New York University. He expects to receive his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University in 2023.  He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

Artist Statement: My work investigates primal narratives, fantasies, and lost memories through painting, and sculpture. The places, figures and specters that appear in my work are vessels holding tales of moral ambiguity. I want to see how these fictions unfold in visual and written language and how they operate within my body.

Boris Torres: (b. 1976, Ecuador) Received his MFA in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, His MA in teaching from City College and his BA from Parsons School of Design. Torres’s work has been part of numerous museum and group shows, including Bronx Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, NY.

A 2019 recipient of the Leslie Lohman Museum fellowship, his work has been featured in Hyperallergic, reviewed in the New York Times and included in several critically acclaimed films such as Tu Me Manques, Keep the Lights On, and Love is Strange.  In Art & Queer Culture, by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Torres’s work is included in an historical survey of significant work on culture and historical survey of significant work on culture and sexual identity from the last 125 years. Mr. Torres is represented by Kates-Ferri Projects.

Artist Statement: My work explores community, queer identity, and history as reflected in my own experience living and working between two cultures, Ecuador, and New York City.

Press Release Exhibition Catalogue Price List Art Works on View: Stephano Espinoza Galarza & Boris Torres Exhibition on YouTube