Pedro Torres. “JORA”

“The jora (from the Greek χώρα) is an ancient term representing an intermediate ‘space’ or ‘place’, often conceptualised as a third reality between the concrete and the abstract, fundamental in philosophy for describing the receptacle or matrix in which things are formed.”

Miró observed his immediate natural surroundings and, from this, constructed a sculptural-pictorial language based on simple forms and colours. In Torres’s case, this observation leads us to a much broader temporal dimension, bringing a material past into the present that continues to unfold. But in both cases, the observation of reality, of the environment, allows for a poetic transformation of materiality. Miró’s quest to explore the physical sensation of colour and its projection into space is the same one that guides Torres in this project.

In this installation, a large slab of alabaster acts as a membrane, absorbing light on both sides. The Miró-esque red sun is made present by a red light source that passes through the sedimented matter, while the reflection of the water animates the stone and restores the movement contained within its long formation process. Employing simple forms like Miró, but in a more complex artistic device, the installation intertwines light, matter, projection, movement and sound to generate this space between the concrete and the abstract, which appeals to individual experience.

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.