Carlos Torres

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I am a Colombian painter who has lived in Canada since 2003. Because I spent my childhood both within the busy capital city, Bogota, where I did my studies, and in the countryside, in contact with nature, I gained a deep respect for the environment.
I developed a strong interest in the study of wildlife and of agricultural production, and obtained a degree in Agronomy from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. I worked a few years in this field. At the same time, I always kept my innate passion for art, mainly spending time drawing and painting—activities I showed promising skill at since my early years.
My life in Colombia taught me to reflect on the big contrasts between modernity and ancestral cultural values and customs, between the love for my homeland and the pain of the violence imposed on it, between the abuses of productive development and the need for care of biodiversity and the preservation of natural ecosystems.
The Amazon and remote places in particular inspire me, both from their natural exuberance and from the vestiges left by extinct civilizations, which are inexhaustible echoes of cultures that maintained their harmony with the environment for millennia. The few surviving tribes that have been harmed by cruel conquerors with their abusive foreign interests are also still very important as they provide a deeper perspective on Colombia’s history.
Since my arrival in Canada, I have delved into my work as a painter, participated in many group exhibitions and exhibited my paintings in London, Stratford, and Toronto, Ontario.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I regularly work with oils, acrylics and mixed techniques but I also consider the use of other mediums and complements. I prefer to resort to the inclusion of fragmentary and focal scenarios, rather than to figurative or abstract ones. Uniting different pictorial elements in the space of each one of the works, creating mutual incidents and changes, emulates relations between components of the nature.
Currently, it is imperative avoiding isolation of individuals which is caused by virtual communication, and that is possible to achieve, among others, with de help of art, through providing spaces where people can reach different ways to identify themselves, and their ancestral surrounding.