Pedro Torres. “Jora”

Jora might evoke the reddish Mallorcan sunsets or the sun seen through the calima (sand in the atmosphere blown from the Sahara). However, by choosing alabaster as the main material for his installation, Pedro Torres proposes a much deeper sense of time that traverses stratified layers of space, time and matter. The rotation of a large slab of stone simulates the characteristic movement of those blazing suns so prominent in Miró’s work and in his profound attention to natural phenomena. The momentary flood of red light and its contrast with the reflections on the water allow us to observe the passage of time and the phantasmagorical appearance of matter in flux. Through its hypnotic contemplation, Jora shows us the passage of time.

The choice of alabaster is not by chance. Featured in Rafael Moneo’s architecture in the Fundació building, it allows Torres to engage with time through sedimentation. It is no longer merely a fossilised material of accumulated textures that appear flattened, but rather emerges as a fragile material, connected to its liquid origin. Exposed without reserve, with its veins, ridges and irregularities, it leads us towards a place of continuous becoming. The exhibition space thus becomes a resonance chamber in which light and sound are taken in and transformed. The sound dimension of the installation prolongs this experience of change: sound appears as yet another material of the work, an unstable presence that shares its fluctuating nature with the alabaster.

Jora is a term from Ancient Greek that can be understood as an intermediate space or place, as a place between the concrete and the abstract. A place of becoming. Torres draws on this notion and proposes an experience in which an analytical view of reality and the poetic do not act as opposing fields, but as complementary ways of approaching what we have yet to fully understand.

In Torres’s work, time rarely appears as a fixed structure. Rather, it emerges as a shifting substance that permeates bodies, images and architectural forms. Perhaps this is where one of the distinctive features of his practice lies: in the possibility of creating situations in which looking ceases to be equivalent to recognising, and remembering ceases to be equivalent to knowing. For a moment, images no longer organise the world by means of transparency or obviousness but through uncertainty, allowing the invisible, the remote or even the as yet incomprehensible to remain open.

Biography

Pedro Torres (Brasil, 1982) lives and works in Barcelona. He is a multimedia artist and independent curator, using a multitude of media in his projects, such as installation, sound, video and photography, among others. He articulates his artistic practice around the notion of time, from which fundamental questions of our reality such as space, language, image and materiality branch out. It is a very broad concept that he addresses from different angles; although Torres always starts from a conceptual and investigative base, the artist intuitively unites theory and poetry to appeal directly to the public and their individual experience. The time that inhabits his work is at once conceptual and experiential, contemporary and anachronistic.

Pedro Torres dialogues with scientific knowledge without didacticism, confronting us with something that escapes linearity, forcing us to perceive with our whole body. Between quantum physics and the poetry of the sensory, Torres’s work traces invisible connections between science, memory and perception.