KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Boris Torres. The opening reception for the artist will be held on Friday, November 17, 5-8pm and the exhibition will continue until December 16, 2023.

In Carnival of Souls, his first solo exhibition at KATES-FERRI PROJECTS, Ecuadorean-born artist Boris Torres creates portraits and narratives reimagined from film stills pulled from Hollywood genre films, vintage pornography, and European art cinema spanning from the 1930s to the present. Torres’s intimate, scaled-down, oil-on-panels perform for his audience similarly to the actors in the original moving pictures. He invites us to enter into a world of unsuspecting characters, some unaware of our presence and others, caught in the act. The vulnerable, indirect expressions and the private spaces depicted in Torres's paintings entice audiences to reflect on their own moments of exposure. Our natural voyeuristic desires are roused by these alluring personas - “a carnival of souls” - pulled from moving pictures and transformed by the artist into lush paint strokes, light and color.

The 8”x 10” oil-on-panel Pierre (2023) is a pivotal work in the series. Drawn from a 1980's French pornographic film, the sitter has his legs spread on a wicker chair, bathed in sunlight from the back, before a white curtain. Wearing only a red and purple tank top and white tube socks, he unselfconsciously bears his body for the camera and locks his gaze with the audience.  His boyish features, along with his unassuming head tilt balanced in his right hand, beckons the viewer to flirt back. The vulnerability and the invitation in this painting are explicit.  These same qualities are found in Torres’s other works that are more and less direct in their approach to seduction. In this respect Pierre holds a central position in the spectrum of Torres’s emotional and artistic range. Even at its small scale, this painting presents the twin desires of wanting and being wanted.

At times recalling the flat figuration of Alex Katz, the play with light and bodies of David Hockney, and the lyrical romanticism of Elizabeth Peyton, the personal nature of Torres’s visuals offer their own haptic sense of melancholia and wanting.  Alongside the incisive queer representation is the parallel longing for understanding and accessibility.  These scenes depicted quietly heighten the senses.  The light in the room gets brighter in one work and hushed in another. The painter is the impresario, his selection of images and the expressive manner in which they are painted are driven by pleasure, allowing audiences into the artist’s desires.  The subjects captured by both lens and painting are never alone, always being observed.  The painting, the painter, and the viewer share a sense of being witnessed and gazed upon by one another. No one escapes the visibility and the fantasy of Torres’s gaze. 

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, Bowman Gallery 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, Tu Me Manques, Love Is Strange, American Horror Story and All the Murders in the Building.

Artist Statement: I was born in a small city in Ecuador and grew up working class, without artistic role models or exposure to art except for a few sexy paintings I  stared at and escaped into during mass in church. Just before adolescence, my mother and I came to the U.S. for a better life. In the New York City public schools, I felt out of place 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 La Guardia High School where I excelled. I’m a New York artist through and through. Still, I felt like an outsider because it was the early 90s, and I was gay, an immigrant, and an artist who created queer images- taboos- during a time of deep homophobia and death from AIDS.  But below the surface in Manhattan, on the piers and in the clubs, I found a community of people, immigrants, artists, gay and trans people, who mirrored my experience. In those worlds, I was given license to make the kind of work that still today feels both forbidden and exciting for me. Over the years of art-making, my work has come to encompass media as diverse as collage, painting, watercolor and life portraiture. I look to each medium for challenges and opportunities and discovery. My heroes are artists who never 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. Through many forms and subjects, I aspire to unearth the complexities of sexuality, gender and race through images that provoke, challenge and embrace.    

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