....Bernardo Torrens
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IN REDEMPTION OF THE BODY
by Basilio Baltasar
Even if spiritual suffocation smothers those who suffer from desolation and abandonment, knocking them with the indolence that comes along with fate, wise and horrible in its routine, unforeseen yet announced, Iike the conjecture man's head is crowned by. Even if they suffer twice over for the only cause their misfortune can conceive, the compensation pain deserves must be anticipated. It is the arms of time, a peaceful mute shadow that governs every corner in of the world, those that keep turning as we all die, those that arrange this cycle of abysses and frights, of compunction, of beauty.
Due to art's dreadful death, (so much belated regret, so much hypocritical sorrow) too many prolong its existence, that committee of impotence, ignorance and evil that gets drunk in the salons of perverse and decadent leisure, bilious and bilic, the incarnation of some exhiled infernal power, a procession of souls condemned to suffer from the endless weight of their actions, vices that spur joy and exhaustion in the ordinary, an unpunished sacrilege that is untouchable in its obscene affront, shouting and massified ambitions dressed up to kiss the devil's ass.
The rival is silent (frightened and shy in the confines of his dignity), but secretly he forswears, he misses the ancient chapters of a culture that has now been destroyed and admires, one by one, the qualities of art understood as the Phoenix: strength from ashes, truth from ashes, expertise and domain, discipline and obedience from ashes, balance and beauty from ashes, even those that are blown by the wind.
If the oracle had said it all about the resurgence of art on fire (our generation set it on fire to light up the future in a frenzied urge for justice), the one that we can now see on its way, crowned by silence, it wouldn't be welcome as something unusual or weird. It wouldn't surprise us. But the prophet's hieroglyph plays and hides, it confuses, it loses us once we have begun to believe in it. There are the symbols that tell us about art and Iaw's expectation of its return. After withstanding the damage of this malevolent century, celebrated by the incubus of an unsatisfied, fierce, relentless power, art's resurrection can only be understood as a mythic insurrection, Iike a chant to the glorious phantoms of the past, to the sublime masters, to the images encouraged by origins. A lethargic vengeance that can wait, that Ieashes out against the ugly and the evil, a Iimpid, Iuminous breath set in the air by an anticipated order. Not the one the fearful search for, not the one convoked by nostalgia, not the one
preached by the apostles and villains of this world. We are talking about a sequence of images that, due to their order in time, recover the aspect of the original tale. There was once a voice able to tell a story: the chapters and figures in the world are this idea's substance, a scene where every gesture finds its place.
Torrens' painting belongs to the art and to that narrative nucleus whose very foundation redeems man's body, revealing the lie it is ailed by, that trivializes it, that perverts it. Subject to the essence of solitude, man's body is a measure, a resemblance, an imprint that hasn't been discerned. The bodies Torrens imprisons are a part of a process: perplexed and locked up in the cell of a gaze, they investigate the extent of their movements, they explore their dimension as if the act of their creator had been sudden. All the bodies want to know is where their enigmatic presence comes from, and they aren't safisfied with the facile consolation from others. Although they sometimes touch, although the habit of recognition seems imminent, they don't make concessions, and with their nudity as only attribute, they shout out their silence, they cry out their solitude.
This realism, whose adjective won't be revealed, shakes our metaphysical concepts and submits us to a disturbing veracity. Thinking the body, thinking thoughts, going over aIl the episodes of movement with our hands, arms and bust, takes us back to the crucial moment of existence: naked in the silent emptiness. Striped of the scheme that ruins the unique consistence of the being, the body must suffer its first panic attack and utter a scandalous cry for help. Afterwards, along with desolation's last fears, comes resignation, destruction, and later, the truth about a single naked body where something more that an obsession for power palpitates in its bosom.
Torrens' work is part of a disconcerting Iearning process: a return to the body's naked truth. In a way it anticipates the desired challenge of a culture stifled by boredom, tired of artifice, weary from the exercise of Iying pretence, exhausted by the idolised mirage. A culture that can no Ionger understand, a useless, broken culture. Perhaps in art we wiII find that intelligent and unrelenting perspective, whose only act of mercy is to view the world and the body just as they are.
Something true is being revealed when the artist fixes his sight on the body again. Not that event of life's fertility that illuminates everything in its mechanical indolence, nor the invisible uterus' weary rapture, nor the sordid movement towards the ample rooms of death, inviting, impatient, hungry. Awareness of the body is only possible when its symbolic value has been understood. In the gesture, when the articulations creek subtly and the flesh tenses the soul with its filaments, a purpose is created. It functions as if it were the only enigma in the world, and is moving when we discover it speaks without words, when we suspect it is saying much more than what it manages to feign before our mistrust. The body and its origins, the body and its mysteries of pleasure and pain, the body and its tyranny, in revolt against time and daily miserliness. The body and its indolent beauty, a conception that comes from nothing only to end up back in the void, that dissolves the image of its presence into the unmistakable and terrible amnesia that annihilates everything. The body is the mark of a will that has finally found its time: it will probably play, try it all, until it finally becomes lost in the agonies of sarcastic ashes. The body is a weird instant, it is the sea in a golden gobIet, all the storms in one look, all cemeteries in a single skeleton. It is necessary to know how to observe in order to understand these images: a unique vision which redeems culture into its very self. The visions of the body restored by Torrens are a premonition.
The solitude which Torrens' bodies are enguIfed by must not be misunderstood. Accustomed to the noise imbedded in our days - the collective misfortune's promiscuous party - we regret Ionely suffering and celebrate shared suffering. It is no consolation and by no means rectifies the most essential of the cosmic revolt, which wiggles Iike a worm in our insides, but we have put off reality through this gesture of surrender that makes us one of the pile. Torrens Iooks for and observes bodies that are alone, naked; watchful of the evolution surrounding them, fully aware of what is going on, devoted, if you like, to a single kiss, a trace of tenderness, but able to fully feeI the meaning of that incarnate life, which, suddenly occupies a place in the world and begins to measure time, to become aware of everything it loses and understand how the universe slides past our very eyes, a large red crystalline net through which the stars and the night, the confines and a fire burning everywhere, pass like an exhalation.
Torrens' bodies are spiritually noble in that way that we have lost sight of and are no longer able to recognise. Culture, in its criminal traffic of bodies and possessions, has everything except respect before that unique incarnation that some men, such as the bullfighter-mason who Torrens painted a portrait of, have known how to admire with dignity. The wisdom of being -ah, the greatness of ancient souls- the total awareness of being in the right place, the only place nobody can tear away from you and which you should never beg for, home to a sovereignty created at the beginning of time, and that so many have missed to become slaves of others consideration, judgement and power.
The body as a symbol evoking mystery in its disconcerting transit towards another world and the body as a proclamation of some majesty who acquired the unique dominion over itself. The simplest and clearest proclamation of insurgence: a clamour which the dead hear and which the dying lament: the only ones who have the strength and the courage to regret. That possession based in the grandiosity of a single body which makes a statement with the elegance of being and that totally devastates ambitions that aim towards illness.
Striped flesh, a corroding ulcer, a wound that pains the body by not healing its bloody gash: the body's ailment is the spirit's ailment. AIl that is feared with such solemnity, that is conjured with ointments, cannot be cured, it is the outcome of a previous affront which already exploded. The world and flesh are a chapter on spiritual defeat: with the capacity to understand it chose ignorance, able to discover, it chose to forget. In these conditions the only possibility is that slow gangrene which eats away at the soul, making bodies succumb in civilian poison, burying them in the leprosy of obedience and fear.
The naked, single body that Torrens has painted is a wise body. It remembers, and in its subtle memories - a dreamy certainty of an indefinite truth - the original impression subsists. Perceive that sensitive silence, protected from dangers, whose fragility still appears to be a sacred condition and from whose seminal river heaven's oxen drink. It seems like an absence, the invisible trail of a wounded animal, the black virgin's great cloak, the breath of a baroque cavern, a potter's warm action of blowing. Introduce your bodies into the Iuminous chapter of these ways and nothing wiIl be like it had been: be quiet.
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