Following his most recent exhibition, Carnival of Souls at Kates-Ferri Projects in New York city, we spoke to Boris Torres about the infinitude of art that is at once intimately sentimental, yet sharply provocative. A painting is, for Torres, inherently a story, constructed upon coats of ambiguities and revelations. His subjects convey a barely concealed wanting, invoking the natural voyeurism of an audience, and casting a golden lamplight on the clandestine spaces of humanity with beautiful subtlety.
Boris Torres was born in Ecuador before moving to New York just before adolescence, where he pursued a perceptible artistic talent at La Guardia high school. Navigating the New York art scene in the early 90s as a gay man who created explicitly queer images, Torres found a community of taboo breakers in the foundations of the city. In the piers and clubs of Manhattan, Boris could let his practice evolve uncensored.
Now, like then, Torres embraces provocation as much as he does vulnerability, though perhaps the two are forever intertwined. The strength to provoke and challenge comes always from a communal force, and community requires a loving embrace. This embrace is a central reference in Torres’ work. His recent exhibition features paintings of scenes from his husband, Ira Sach’s latest film, Passages (2023). While literally depicting the laying embrace of the characters, these paintings simultaneously signify an embrace of one another’s art. This is an embrace that refuses the isolation of the artist.
Torres’ art manifests connection: between the painter and his subject, the subject and the audience, the audience and the inspirations. Those connections are infinite, incessantly weaving a patchwork of lives and experiences across the canvas. By hazily unveiling these connections, Torres is engaged in an exposé of interconnected stories that eventually come to reveal, in essence, a Carnival of Souls.
You recall your earliest exposure to art as the “sexy” religious paintings that became the perennial focus of your distraction during mass in church. This memory seems an apt foreshadowing of your exploration of the taboo within your work. Why do you think you were so absorbed by these paintings as a child? Do you have any specific paintings or features of those paintings in mind?
I believe it is a combination of things that birthed my desire to make images that [are] sometimes described as explicit or taboo. The restlessness a child can feel during mass in church, when expected to be very quiet for over an hour, with no other choice but to look around and examine the paintings and sculptures around them, often of violent images, such as an almost naked beautiful man crucified, or a saint with her eyes gouged out, or arrows piercing the body of another beautiful almost naked man, and so on. The church I went to when I was little kid, I often purposely sat next to a large painting about four times my size. At the base of the painting there are people burning in flames, many naked, in repentance, with their arms stretched out towards the virgin Mary above sitting on clouds, holding a naked baby Jesus surrounded by putti flying around and above. The painting engulfed me in ecstasy. I got lost in this painting and its drama. I understood that all those people had done something bad to deserve to be there burning in hell, and I made up stories about each of them, what each had done that was so terrible to upset god, and I wondered who Mary would choose to forgive and save and who she would let burn in the flames. I had a vivid imagination and these type of images gave me ideas about the infinite possibilities of what art can look like and what art can make one feel.
You mention having no artistic role models as a child growing up in Ecuador, though you moved to New York just before adolescence. Did you only begin to consider pursuing art after this move? What was your initial inspiration or motivation?
When I immigrated to New York I was 10 years old and I did not do well academically in the public schools, but I was lucky to have art teachers who saw a talent in me and encouraged me to pursue it. I did well in my art classes and those teachers became my role models and I learned that making art and being an artist could be a path into adulthood. I think luck brought me specifically to New York, a city full of art and artists.
How did your time growing up in New York City help you find your artistic niche?
It happened naturally as I have been living here and showing my work for many years. I grew up in New York during the early nineties and met many friends at the peers and in the nightclubs and bars in the East Village, many of whom were artists like myself, and accepting of art that spoke about each other’s experiences being queer, trans, immigrants etc, this during a time of deep homophobia because of the AIDS crisis that was still killing many people at the time.
Your most recent exhibition, Carnival of Souls, was a collection of portraits re-imagined from vintage pornography, Hollywood film stills, and European art cinema from the 1930s-present. Beginning with your portraiture, why do you find yourself more drawn to the figurative than the abstract, and to people more than the inanimate?
I’ve always loved film and often, when I’m watching a movie I’d catch a scene that is beautifully shot and I think to myself - wow that could be a beautiful image to paint. There are many film stills I have collected over the years. I like the story a painting can hide and reveal, which at times can be more direct with representational work than with abstract work. I do love to work abstractly also, particularly with color, shape and patterns. I’m making large abstract collages that are simply about those concepts.
In your previous work you tend to paint portraits from still life. How is the process different when painting from various forms of media?
I have been painting portraits of people from life for the past six years. This is an ongoing practice that allows space for the slowing of time and finding intimacy in the process of sitting with someone face to face in close proximity looking at and talking to each other. In result the paint is a record of the time the person and I shared.
Like the sexy paintings you remember from church, this exhibition extends your sustained interrogation with the taboo throughout your work. How do you define the taboo and how does this exhibition respond to or comment on that?
I think the word “taboo” in art also describes non commercial work, images that are difficult to exhibit or sell within the art market because they are images that are offensive or upsetting to people. I question when and why the censorship of pornography is enforced in the art world and when it isn’t. I explore those questions in my work also. I’m fascinated by artists who have found a way to be successful with their taboo or pornographic work such as Robert Maplethorpe and the film maker Paolo Pasolini for example. I think these type of visuals are less popularised in painting particularly. In my recent exhibition Carnival of Souls we focused more on showing the work that pays homage to film and intimacy than the taboo.
I am particularly drawn to your manipulation of light from the hazy, shadowed yellow of Isabella (2023) to the bright, morning lightness of Gil (2023) and Luca (2023). I feel like it creates a kind of dualistic intimacy that is at once private yet entirely observable. Would you say these pieces invite a kind of voyeuristic gaze? What is the relationship between the paintings and their observer?
Yes the paintings are about peeping into someone’s private spaces, us catching them or them catching us watching them, in the playing with those boundaries.
Family and the familial space is a theme I noticed interlaced throughout much of your work. Indeed, this collection includes a still, Ben and Erwan (2023), from your husband Ira Sach’s latest film. How does your relationship with your own family influence or inspire your work?
The world around me including my family constantly inspires me in ways that I’m not aware of at the time. My kids who are twins asked me to do collages for them when they were 5 years old, and at the same time I was teaching collage projects to High School students, eventually the technique slipped in to my own work which I continue to explore today. After I became a dad, I began painting portraits of queer families that look like my own family because I had never seen queer families represented in contemporary painting. My husband Ira’s latest film Passages is beautifully shot, I was able to watch scenes of the film before it was completed and I loved what I saw, and used some of those images to create paintings, particularly the scenes of people laying in bed.
You said your “heroes are artists who never separated their work from their lives”. Why is this important to you? Do you think art can still be sincere and powerful if it does not reflect the artist’s life?
I think art can be powerful when it comes from a sincere place, whether or not it reflects an artists personal life, but rather when it reflects the passion about what they are making. I’m often driven to make work from my personal life, and I’m inspired by Alice Neel’s portraits for example, because she painted people she had relationships with, her neighbours, lovers, friends. I feel connected to those people through her work- as if I know them also- she beautifully captures her connection to those people through paint.
Who is your most memorable subject you have painted? What was their story?
I cannot think of a particular person but instead have memorable moments with people I have painted from life who I had a difficult time painting. Perhaps because I was nervous or perhaps they were reserved or because the portrait was not coming out the way I wanted it to. I thought I was making a bad painting- I remember these moments because at some point during the session I kept thinking to myself “how do I get out of this situation- this is not working, I cannot solve it and it is too late to fix the painting.”. But at some point I decide to stick with it and eventually something interesting happens - I have to pick myself up and just continue.
Finally, if you could paint anyone, whose portrait would you most like to paint?
I would paint Atahualpa.
