May 5 – June 1                   

“Paysage Exposé, Paysage Figurant” 

Paintings by Rafael Torres Correa

In partnership with the Cultural Service of the Embassy of France, Cross MacKenzie Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of paintings by the Cuban-born French-national, Rafael Torres Correa.  Originally from Havana, this international artist has widely exhibited his work in Mexico, Spain and France and with Cross MacKenzie in 2014.

Rafael Torres Correa creates lyrical universes in his large abstract canvases.  His paintings evoke memories – symbolic and emotional – and conjure imagined experiences of water and floating islands with their shifting imagery and fluid execution using washes, drips, dabs and splashes of paint. These landscapes are transitory territories and shifting metaphors – a state that parallels the artist’s own migrations and cultural identity.

“When Rafael Torres-Correa leaves Cuba, his home country, he brings along his own landscape. The uncertain ways of memory have shaped his artistic approach, somewhere in between what is to come and what is to disappear, in between celebration and dissipation. Wherever he settles, in France, Mexico, Spain, Amazonia and the United States, the artist confronts his inner images with the places that host him. He encapsulates the traces, the footprints, the connections, the ways that bring him back to the light and the transparency of the texture, as an anticipation of oblivion. The artist infinitely sculpts his changing identity and yet remains determined to act. With the shades of blue depicting his oceans that push us away and yet bring us back, with the shades of red of his vital spark that reshape a cosmogony of harmony, he immerses us into his silent memories scattered in time and space”. 

Catherine Albertini

Cultural Attaché Embassy of France to USA

Torres Correa’s mixed media technique is as liquid as the subject – the canvases appear practically wet. The artist’s palette is often that of the sea, deep turquoises and blues punctuated by flashes of hot color like reflective sunlight.  Torres Correa ventures into ceramics for this exhibition, painting tiles with the same bold gestures and spontaneity expressed in his canvases. 

Rafael Torres Correa creates these compelling works of art in a universal visual language, what one could truly call the “international style”.