Uma cena silenciosa e quase vazia, momento de calor sem vento ao ar livre, à tarde(...): Mario García Torres

An Almost Empty Silent Scene, Warm, Windless Outdoor Moment, In the Afternoon, Where Seemingly Nothing But Everything Happens In This Dead-End Warehouse Street As If Life Goes On Regardless Of Time. Film Photograph, Flash.-

In his second solo exhibition at Galeria Luisa Strina, Mario García Torres presents a set of bronze and metal sculptures distributed across the floor and wall of the exhibition space, creating a kind of mise-en-scène whose script is loosely evoked in the title of the show. The bronze works are developments of the series titled Losts Acts, first exhibited at Galeria Franco Noero in Turin in 2017. Losts Acts refers to the manufacturing process of these pieces. Initially, the cardboard boxes are crushed by the artist until the original engineering of their construction is no longer prominent, introducing an element of irrationality to these industrialized materials. The boxes are then submerged in moulding sand and subsequently burned during the casting process, simultaneously fixing their shapes in bronze while annihilating the material index (the boxes) of the artist's action/performance.

García Torres is primarily known for work that responds to the legacy of conceptual art and institutional critique through films, photographs, slide projections, among other media. Speaking about the exhibition, the artist explains that it is the result of a desire to approach the idea of the impromptu and to produce something closer to unpredictability than rationality: "Before, making sculptures was a way to physically test the ideas I encountered in historical research. But then I understood that I had taken that research and broken with my own modus operandi. (...) I used to be more rational about my practice. I always understood everything about a work before I started making it. Now, I'm more interested in the subtleties that happen from one work to another, and how ideas mature from the experience I have with them."

More than a selection of independent works, the exhibition was conceived analogously to a scene from a film, as if something were about to happen beyond what is forged in bronze. The sculptures are arranged in the gallery space seemingly at random, pushing the boundaries between sculpture and waste. Complementing this scene are two wall sculptures composed of groups of ants forged in metal that form compositions characterized simultaneously by ideas of order and disorder. With these works, Mario García Torres sought to emphasize the surreal nature of the scene constructed in the gallery space: "I remember being impressed by the way ants create forms in their collectivity, sometimes modern forms, rational forms. It was then that I imagined that ants could enter this conversation. Small insects that, by instinct, are engaged in our conversation about the modern, perhaps not only creating forms in a gallery, but also interacting with the works and the architecture."