ECCPROJECTS #23

ECCPROJECTS #23 Mario García Torres

2 December 2024 – 5 January 2025
Open by appointment only

ECC Project Room
Via Martiri della Libertà 2
10023 Chieri TO Italy

Caption of the work exhibited:
Mario García Torres, A Drizzle Reminder, n.d., photocopy toner on canvas, 70 x 108 cm

Mario García Torres (Monclova, 1975) lives and works in Mexico City and Los Angeles.
Mario García Torres uses a variety of mediums as video, installation, photography, and sculpture to question the stability of such concepts as time, memory, image, and the very essence of the artist’s role in society. An artist deeply interested in uncertainty and counter-narratives, his work blurs the space between fact and fiction through research and a wide range of storytelling strategies such as appropriation, narrative, repetition and reenactment.
This painterly series is made by pouring toner -a runny dust composed of microscopic grains normally used to make photocopies- over canvas. One could say that these monochromes are time-based works: a narrative emerges as the material pro-gresses over the surface, from top to bottom. As direct records of an irreproducible accident, the Toner works negotiate gesture and environment, capturing the slightest changes in the particles’ drift. They subtly cite a historical body of work by two artists that García Torres had already dedicated works to: Robert Smithson pouring asphalt over land and Alighiero Boetti photocopying the rain. The photocopier—a near- obsolete technology, like film and slide projectors—was adopted by artists since immediately after its inception, in the 1960s. Conceiving these works as monochrome paintings, García Torres strips his emblematic material of its associations with a deadpan machine aesthetic and cheap reproducibility, focusing instead on its erratic nature and on the impossibility of its reproduction outside the machinery.