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Artist: Alexi Torres
Title: Peleador
Year created: 2014
Medium: Oil on canvas
Signed by the artist
Edition: 1 of 1
Height (inches): 14
Width (inches): 18
Depth (inches): 2
This piece is framed.
Conquering the creative powers of the universe, Alexi Torres’s paintings are surrounded by an exceptional complexity. His art creates a mysterious perception of understanding and surprise in the human mind. Unable to consciously understand or articulate the reason, it converses to our deepest senses by seeing through the need of a critical viewpoint. Addressing the urgency to recover balance and harmony with the environment, the artist paints meticulously detailed leaves, feathers, and other organic materials to create his works and thus grapples with ways to express the influences of the past, the responsibilities of the now, and possibilities of the future. “...that’s my way to show our inter- connection with each other [...] we are all interconnected with each other on a physical and spiritual level [...] little pieces put together as one” (Alexi Torres).
Employing his unique painting technique, Torres immortalizes influential figures and emblems and thus reconstructs iconic images that represent classic and modern times from all branches of human development, including the arts, politics, science, education and military and thus changes the con- text of the initial forms into ecological, fragile, ephemeral and natural elements.
Alexi Torres sees the creation of art as planting an idea and harvesting it. Inspired by his upbringing in Cuba, he employs this metaphor through starting and finishing each painting on the waning moon, as his ancestors did during the harvest. The artist is completely involved in the production of his art work. He builds the stretchers, stretches the canvases, and primes them himself. To Torres his paintings “are like objects [...] like something [he] creates from zero. I want to be part of that from zero to the end.”
Born in 1979 in Matanzas, Cuba, Torres attended the National School of Arts and the Elemental School Art in Havana, Cuba. Although he acknowledges his Cuban roots as essential to his creative process, he sees himself as a global artist.
His works have been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions, as well as fairs around the world, including DMoMA Lausanne, Switzerland (2013); UNIX Gallery, New York (2013); Hoover Li- brary, Atlanta (2013); Rush Gallery, New York (2012); Kai Lin Art, Atlanta (2012); Scope Miami (2012); Art Miami (2012); Evan Lurie Gallery (2011); Naomy Silva Gallery, Atlanta (2004).
Torres’s work can be found in major private and public collections, including the private collections of Oprah Winfrey and Will Smith (Los Angeles, CA); Hoover Public Library (Hoover, AL); David Mills (San- ta Cruz, CA); Michael & Julie Mills (Denver, CO); Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith (Atlanta, GA); Addo Foundation (Atlanta, GA); Besharat Contemporary (Atlanta, GA); Museum of Art Matanzas (Cuba); Ruth Bennett (Australia).