Painting the Animals of Remembrance: Lorena Torres in the Third and Final of ‘Three Rooms’

Banner image: Lorena Torres, Expectante de todo lo que fui y lo que soy (Expectant of everything I was and everything I am) (detail), 2024. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 47". All images courtesy of Weinstein Hammons Gallery.

 

In Lorena Torres’ exhibition, Alguna vez, en cualquier lugar, nos soñé (Sometime, Somewhere, I Dreamed of Us), each piece is a vignette of specifics abstracted and hyperbolized, of timelines melded beyond recognition. Similar to the way moments are recalled from the past, these memories are distorted, and the details within them evolve. Like playing the telephone game, the original lived or spoken material changes over time, becoming only an echo of what it once was, aging alongside skin and bone.

Torres’ painted recollections are permeated by the energy of the Colombian Caribbean, where she was born and raised. Painting her visions through that rich lens of Caribbean life, she says her “images harbor both an imaginary, fantastical setting, as well as one that is anecdotal and derives from memory.” With faces left vague and proportions stretched to the surreal, a haze gathers around the edges of detail. After all, when remembering, it’s often not facial expression or the context of age that’s summoned. Instead, it’s the color and form of a flower in the hand, or the feeling of rising, of warming, of turning red or blue. That action of remembering — of surrendering to the blurring of memory and time and particularity — is the fertile reserve from which Torres draws.

"Many of my paintings are based on family memories, experiences that took place in our intimate setting," says Torres. "I often turn to the family archive as a reference, particularly to those depicting moments of leisure and rest." In Un día soñé con un mundo suave y lindo (One day I dreamed of a soft and beautiful world), two figures sit idly with bare feet in the grass, partially resting on each other. Moths flutter in the air, and dogs nap at the ground. It is a dreamy scene, one that feels calming, restful, and mundane. The figures appear content, like there is nowhere else to be. They gaze in the distance somewhat absently, perhaps actively reminiscing about something themselves. 

 

Lorena Torres, Un día soñé con un mundo suave y lindo (One day I dreamed of a soft and beautiful world), 2024. Oil on canvas, 47 x 55"

 

Torres’ use of color, texture, and pattern provides for a wistful experience. What Torres calls "the tension between the vivid and the ethereal” releases through the foliage and flowers ornamenting each piece, enlivening the spark of imagining — whether that imagining is born of past, present, or future. "I walk through corridors of kisses, through trips to the sea, through the instant of standing together on the shore, through shared dreams, through tables that become common places," reads the exhibition artist statement. "It is a seed that sows the origin of a territory that only exists in my mind, and the memory grows, widens. Everything happens at the same time. I go back to the first encounters, I cling to the last goodbyes. And at the end of my memories, there is me, there is you, there is us with our shadows and our solitude.”

The token otherworldliness of Magical Realism brings a hue of romance to the paintings, whilst also gracing the paintings with something larger than life. "I wouldn’t refer to Magical Realism as a tradition, it is more of a mystical figure that exists in the Latin American atmosphere, namely that of the Colombian Caribbean Coast. It has always been present in my work, from the beginning, even if occasionally involuntarily," Torres explains. I’m reminded of reading Like Water for Chocolate and The Alchemist and being surprised by the actions and appearances of the characters, not knowing what to categorize as dream or reality in these stories. In that same vein, the characters in Torres’ paintings stretch beyond comfortable proportions, growing into beast-like figures. Take Soñamos una tarde (We dreamed one afternoon) for example, or Pintando morrocolla (Painting morrocolla). In the former, the figures rest in each other's arms, perhaps having just enjoyed a picnic in the park and then fallen asleep. Their bloated bodies seemingly float upwards, ungrounded and uncontained, yet enveloped in one another. “In this pictorial universe," Torres writes, "bodies stretch upwards, crawling towards a poetics of stillness, searching for something that has been silenced and forgotten: a repressed animality... that, although hidden under the layers of time and civilization, has never ceased to reside in us.” 

 

Top: Lorena Torres, Soñamos una tarde (We dreamed one afternoon), 2024. Oil on canvas, 31.5 x 39". Bottom: Lorena Torres, Pintando morrocolla (Painting morrocolla), 2024. Oil on canvas, 63 x 59"

 

Tu cara color achiote y una mesa llena (Your face the color of achiote and a table full) is another example of one of Torres’ figures being pulled like taffy towards the sky. She is stilled in suspension but waiting to expand further like the achiote shrub planted behind her. The blue-clothed table also seems to lift from the earth, hovering just above it. “In the tangible world, instinct is often subdued, repressed by the external demands of society, reason and rules. However, in the intangible realm of memory, where the boundaries between the real and the imagined are blurred, the possibility of confronting this silenced animality opens up.” 

A fiery red color inflames the hands and faces of many of Torres’ figures. In En medio de la noche: las estrellas y nuestros cuerpos (In the middle of the night: the stars and our bodies), two entwined bodies in the throes of passion have faces shrouded in a red murk. The red-hot glow is emitted also from ears and in between fingers. Torres is incredibly effective with her use of color, evoking in each painting a yearning as well as a fervor. In Cartageneras, for example, that searing tone of red is cooled by the periwinkle blue of the flowers, and further soothed by the soft peachskin pink of the sky beyond. There are colors she uses that are alert and desirous, and colors used that are more pastel, more subdued and delicate, like that paper thin cache of memory we attempt to restore over again. 

 

Lorena Torres, Tu cara color achiote y una mesa llena (Your face the color of achiote and a table full), 2024. Oil on canvas, 47 x 55"

 

Torres’ paintings are imbued with symbolism as spindly snakes and split-open banana peels litter the scenes. “...Elements such as fruit, knives, plates, snakes, flowers, become recurring motifs in my paintings, but I wouldn’t want them to be attached to a particular meaning, I would rather they work as clues for the viewer, in which they can begin to detect a pattern, that may also lead them to recognizing something within themselves.” Cast to the edges of the paintings or laid in the foreground of the subjects, the objects enigmatically decorate the scenes.

This exhibition is a reminder that within the adaptive and dynamic qualities of memory, there is an opportunity to indulge in the uncouth and consider unlived possibilities. It's a place to romanticize little moments — the afterschool snack that was minute but memorable, the preteen crushes that felt like love at the time, or the unhurried crawl of a summer afternoon in the sun. With Torres’ memories anchored in the place of the Caribbean, her paintings play tug o’ war between reality and flexible fantasy. In the expanse “where memories intertwine with dreams and contemplation,” Torres brings complex figures to life, allowing them to rest in their own contradiction, and be seen in the liminality of details forgotten and realized. “The bodies that inhabit these paintings are not simply static figures; they are entities in process, stretching toward a deeper understanding of their interiority.” Within the ten painted vignettes, there is room for these entities to grow, to feel, and to change. ◼︎ 

 

Alguna vez, en cualquier lugar, nos soñé (Sometime, Somewhere, I Dreamed of Us), detail of installation view. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

Three Rooms, which includes Alguna vez, en cualquier lugar, nos soñé  (Sometime, Somewhere, I Dreamed of Us), is on view at Weinstein Hammons Gallery through February 8. This is the third of three articles about the exhibitions on display. Follow the gallery on Instagram @weinsteinhammons.

To see more of Lorena Torres' work, visit the gallery website or follow her on Instagram @lorenamargaritas.