There is nothing in this world, in existence that lacks importance in the eyes of Javier Torices. The onlooker can tell from the twists and turns of his artistic work. An artist that curves and controls his work, meticulously portraying reality in an image that is impossible to attribute to anyone else, owing to the significance and optical perspective he bestows on what he observes.
This is highly personal painting coming from an author in constant dialogue with himself. He is the mediator of perennial impulses of thoughts that transcend to the spectator from his endeavors. Consequently, nothing in the world is alien to the individual reality Javier Torices invites us to look into.
From painting liturgy that his hands so often begin with to complete and bring living scenarios to art, it is possible to feel the harmonization and understanding of the author about his own nature and the way life and the world are presented.
Nothing is left to chance in the born-to-be-painter’s-eyes. Painting and life. The way Torices looks at reality conveys us the life of an artist with infinite resources and of exceptional qualities; to the point that the observer may feel almost disturbed confronting such strange technical perception, startled by his depictions, dazzled by his sobriety and creative spirit.
As previously stated, Javier likes to challenge, not to brag. His ability to get personally involved, to reflect on what he is dealing with – reaching noteworthy conclusions – corresponds to his talent at resolving matters as well as ensuring the subject matter is congruent with the emotional side, what awards soul to the painting.
No doubt, that is the reason why the echoes of the city have so much to say in his work. The city is depicted in settings where light and shadow, night and day, portray the contrast between its nature and an array thought up in human dimensions and lost in their proportions yet providing shelter nonetheless – a subject that Torices towers over with his artistic eye. Landscape and atmospheres made up in architectures perfumed in their crossing with the distance and the horizon depicted in true settings, mist or sparkles. A style of architecture that Javier keeps close at heart and systematizes in his paintings without transgressing it and yet making it his own in the silent sounds, alone among the bustle and commotion, distant by reason of their proximity, inspired in the pictorial traces enticing the canvas, as one who is searching and discovers the animated pulse through which the city respires and the noise quietens in the looks that mutter emotion.
Torices paints the night. He investigates and creates his own “esfumato” technique. He paints the affluent night and the serene day. This is where his works are filled with renovated visions and enchantment amid splendor and captive reflections, like a man looking towards the horizon lost in thought. The city in Torices’ night and day is an infinite one. It is dressed up in new corners and edifices, touched by that particular ambience that one encounters when you are in a place that is the result of the painter’s skill, marvelling the senses, bringing about lost memories, emotions that create the right feel for time to come to a still, softly stroking melancholy.
And it is from the thread of this challenge that time has imposed that drives Torices to aim higher in his propositions. The painter is well aware that this is no easy business. Nevertheless, he willingly embraces it by surprising and convincing the observer.
Javier Torices, draws deeply into the sea, into the water, into its shapes and effects, conforming a new stylistic order that has nothing to do with marine matters. The artist gets soaked, drenched; he studies the surface of the water and the landscape it creates. He fixes his attention in the behaviour of the surroundings; he turns liquid into waves that look as if he is kneading his work in caresses and strikes of passion. The painting shapes the bursting sensations of the immenseness.
Torices’ sea is depicted in the seashore – the link between the sand and the sea – a beach of fine lost surface, perfectly portrayed. It diffuses leisure and games to become animated solitude and poetical cadence to the stimuli of its proximity. Sand and water kissed by the spume of waves, reasoned with the sea of thoughts for the touch of a look and for bubbles impossible to paint yet painted.
Torices’ sea is more than all this. He seems to have understood it like this and experienced the depth that agitates it. The tone of its skin and the colour of its abyss. For Javier knows that the sea has skin. Skin that can become relaxed or troubled, erect or contrite, such as a body stirred by cold or emotions, prophetic or discomfited within, allowing those powerful distinct close-ups of transparent darkness warn us of the position from where the artist stands.
He looks from the inside, from the depth that forces the artist to recreate the sea as something not interfered with subjective meaning or epic granting. Torices paints the sea from the surface to its depth. As if in life-size, almost perpendicular to the eye, allowing a glimpse of land, no suggestions. He needs to paint the sea the way it is and we see it; unfathomable, almost black, blue, green or a biting mirror of lights. In the distance, in the scenes’ primary place, views of the outskirts, perhaps the city, reverence to the horizon not resolved in cold blends but in architectural poems, chosen for their harmony from the sea, from where he watches and wades.
The artist becomes soaked, drenched, painting from the truth, portraying the sea he inspires, the sea and its presence, without nonsense or embellishment; he paints the sea that is, deep, grand -since grand it is -, treated as a muse, poetry of naked skin.
Juan Antonio Tinte
