Nueva entrevista de Shirley Rebuffo. Desde hace más de 25 años, la actividad artística del uruguayo Rodolfo Torres gira en torno a las posibilidades expresivas del collage. Utilizando una gama tonal modesta en la que predominan el blanco, el negro, el rojo y los ocres, sus creaciones se concretan en elaborados y armónicos puzzles estructurados en series en las que cada elemento de las composiciones (incluso el mismo papel o cartulina de base) juega un papel clave.
Presentamos la entrevista en dos posts (el primero en español y este segundo en inglés), junto con una variada selección de imágenes de la obra desarrollada por Rodolfo en los últimos años.
New interview by Shirley Rebuffo. For more than 25 years, the artistic activity of Uruguayan Rodolfo Torres has revolved around the expressive possibilities of collage. Using a modest tonal range in which white, black, red and ochre predominate, his creations take the form of elaborate and harmonious puzzles structured in series in which each element of the compositions (even the base paper or cardboard itself) plays a key role.
We present the interview in two posts (the first one in Spanish and this second in English), along with a varied selection of images of the work developed by Rodolfo in recent years.
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Rodolfo Torres
(Santa Lucía, Canelones, Uruguay, 1951-)
Rodolfo trabajando / at work. Foto / Photo: Atilio Dutruel Victora
Rodolfo Torres was born in Santa Lucía (Canelones, Uruguay), on July 21, 1951. Since 1961 he had a training in plastic expression workshops with a constant self-training.
He is an active cultural manager and workshop leader mainly in his hometown. He works as a plastic expression workshop leader in initial and primary public education.
The characteristics of his collages are of clean line and with a scarce but sufficient chrome to realize at sight a perfect assembly between the form and the expression of each piece.
From 1994 to 2020 he conducted workshops of plastic expression, especially within the techniques of crayons and collage in preschools, schools, particularly those of special education for children with different abilities and in NGOs for adults residing in mental health centers, and in special education for children and teacher training in that area.
His projects won the Inca Competition on four occasions, he has published more than ten books and has been exhibiting his work on an individual basis practically uninterruptedly since 1997. From 2005 to 2012 he curated the project Acción de murales developed in Santa Lucía, where approximately 1000 mts2 of murals were painted in different neighborhoods together with social and educational institutions and neighborhood groups. Since 1998 he has participated in projects organized in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Germany, England, United States, Canada, France, Japan, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Ghana, Switzerland, Greece, Russia, China.
Serie de grises / Gray Series, collage sobre papel / collage on paper, 2017
"Alcoi", collage sobre papel artesanal de algodón / collage on handmade cotton paper, Mas Sopalmo, 2017
Interview by Shirley Rebuffo
Shirley Rebuffo: Tell me about yourself, how did your connection with art begin?
Rodolfo Torres: My connection with art began when I was in school, as my parents sent me to the Plastic Arts workshop of Professor Washington Amaro. Later, when I was a teenager, the presence of an artist from Santa Lucía with a solid background in Montevideo, a neighbor and friend of my family, Washington Brignoni, who somehow affirmed what was a basic primary initiative in expression, was very important.
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Serie "Caripelas", collage sobre cartulina Fedrigoni / collage on Fedrigoni cardboard", 30 x 21 cm.
Collage sobre papel de algodón / collage on cotton paper, Mas Sopalmo, 2017
SR: Nowadays your practice revolves exclusively around collage, how did your interest in this artistic aspect arise?
RT: Although in Brignoni's workshop the training was basically in drawing and painting, collage, without being able to specify why, was already among my acts. I remember cutting and composing collages from fragments of different comics from the newspapers that were received at home, particularly with the characters of Tarzan and The Phantom as their axis, which I inserted in an image where they interacted on other backgrounds and circumstances.
Although I spent a long time working with mixed techniques, it has been 25 years since collage became my specific creative representation.
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"Sin título / Untitled", collage sobre papel de algodón / collage on cotton paper, 40 x 30 cm., Vendrell, 2020
"Sin título / Untitled", 2020
SR: And how did 3D collage come about?
RT: From the beginning, where my collage strategy was basically pure, without any kind of intervention, I always had the idea, or rather the challenge, to go beyond that. I sensed, without having any theoretical or technical certainties, that it was possible to challenge a collage that went towards other expressive possibilities.
Time, with the contact of other realities of making and the road, gave me tools, particularly conceptual, so that one day in 2019 I began to put this idea on track and take it as a form of creative act, with results quite similar to my original ideas. Which doesn't mean it's an end in itself, as it's just a path to continue.
SR: What colors can you say mark your work?
RT: I deal with white, red, black and gray. This doesn't mean that I don't use others according to the expressive need, but in reality and given what I've found, for now these are the colors I feel comfortable with and which facilitate my expression in this line of work.
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"Libro de Artista / Artist's Book", sobre cartulina Fedrigoni / on Fedrigoni cardboard, 22 x 99 cm.
Serie Intérpretes / Performers Series, collage, 2021
SR: Looking back to the beginning of your first artistic experiences, how do you feel today in relation to the creative universe?
RT: That kid from Amaro's workshop, with several successes and too many mistakes, followed his instinct, of course, without a back and with few tools to develop what was fermenting inside me.
I went through several artistic attempts, but always that path of visual art was very close and ended up being the way out of disenchantment, until one day it was definitely "the way", the Tao, according to Eastern philosophy, there the troubles disappear, the inopportune suggestions cease to weigh, those who speak as artists and are not, the uncertainties are faced and the experience is made by walking.
That creative universe is a world where I feel very comfortable. It is shelter and embrace and I feel it as my place in the world.
"La prisión / Prison", collage, 2021
Serie Despliegues / Deployments Series, 92 x 65 cm., 2022
SR: In what way would you say that your trajectory in the artistic field strengthened you existentially?
RT: By understanding and feeling that "I am doing" and what I share in the community to "be within it", my existence was positively strengthened because art and its various manifestations are undoubtedly necessary in life.
Collage sobre papel de algodón / collage on cotton paper, Mas Sopalmo, 2017
SR: When approaching your moments of making a work, what are your preferences and influences?
RT: Actually, I don't approach the moment of creating with any preparation; it is simply part of the work. Personally, there are many hours every day of the week and in them I elaborate the work almost in a playful way. Collage, because of its particular strategy, allows me to do it, it takes me back to that distant childhood where more than an artistic sense a playful sense predominated, of course now with some more tools to think about it and create it.
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"Sin título / Untitled", collage sobre cartulina Fedrigoni / collage on Fedrigoni cardboard, 30 x 21 cm., 2021
Serie de grises / Gray Series, collage sobre papel / collage on paper, 2017
SR: There is a lot of talk about how therapeutic art is, and you, precisely, do a very special job as a creative coach with people who suffer from various psychiatric pathologies, and even special children. How do you coordinate the artistic actions to be carried out in order to enhance creativity in them?
RT: I consider, and without being an expert from a scientific point of view, approaching it rather from experience that artistic expression allows to generate, in those who resort to it, a possible complementary way to alleviate certain situations.
The coordination of these activities is different from the one that could be given in workshops in other circumstances.
Undoubtedly, this is where I learned to give practical value to the "way", finding in the interrelation between workshop leader-participant the necessary exchange where we learn from everyone and among everyone, although it may not seem so.
The work objectives are not an end in themselves; time becomes relative, the socialization of the meeting transforms each workshop almost into a ritual and there, without haste, but without pause, we walk together towards the proposal that usually has stations where we can recompose the precise strategy to continue.
It is a challenging but enriching task. The coordination of those workshops in which I spent 25 years of my life was an apprenticeship that I thank life for having had that opportunity.
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"Sin título / Untitled", collage sobre papel de algodón / collage on cotton paper, 40 x 30 cm., Vendrell, 2020
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Serie "Caripelas", collage sobre cartulina Fedrigoni / collage on Fedrigoni cardboard", 30 x 21 cm.
SR: Do you consider that art is something that helps to see Humanity with a hopeful and unifying perspective?
RT: Of course, art builds the possibility of unifying human beings without borders or flags.
Serie Intérpretes / Performers Series, collage, 2021
"Alcoi", collage sobre papel artesanal de algodón / collage on handmade cotton paper, Mas Sopalmo, 2017
SR: You live in a small town with certain characteristics that make it especially quiet and picturesque, do you think this gives you an unusual margin of freedom?
RT: That's a subject we always talk about at home and in the workshop.
I think that this unusual margin of freedom, in your words, is very relative. In these towns the traditional usually reigns, and it is not always easy to sustain an action that is not framed within it, therefore, the sense of freedom is conditioned and limited in many circumstances.
I understand that each place has its own difficulties to experience or exercise freedom. These are not good times for it.
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Serie Despliegues / Deployments Series, 92 x 65 cm., 2022
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Serie Despliegues / Deployments Series, 92 x 65 cm., 2022
SR: Any anecdotes about your training or career?
RT: I can think of one that undoubtedly marked me personally and artistically. It happened at the end of the 20th century, when I participated in the Paper Biennial of Alcoi, in the Valencian Community, organized by the Consortium of Museums.
From there, there was an epistolary link with Antoni Miró, an important Valencian cultural reference, and from that bridge we achieved exhibitions in Santa Lucia and the region within our projects of artistic diffusion with his pieces and the edition of book-catalogues with texts by writers from Santa Lucia.
Only after 20 years of cultivating a friendship with him, through the mail with handwritten letters, I was able to meet him in his land and in his world of Mas Sopalmo. Through him I was able to present my first exhibition abroad at the Centre d'Art Ovidi Montllor in Alcoi, which allowed other subsequent exhibitions of artists from Santa Lucia.
"Sin título / Untitled", 2020
Serie de grises / Gray Series, collage sobre papel / collage on paper, 2017
SR: What do you have in mind for the future in relation to your art?
RT: Next July I will present in the Commercial and Industrial Center of Santa Lucia the exhibition "desencajes" (Uncagings) where I will present 33 small format collages in pizza boxes and in September in Meraki Santa Lucia, the exhibition "Los Estuches Secretos" (The Secret Cases), composed of 15 collages.
Rodolfo trabajando / at work. Foto / Photo: Atilio Dutruel Victora
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Collage and its doors
Rodolfo Torres
"When I started informally in my childhood with precarious collages, playfulness was the basis of their construction.
Of course, I was still unaware that there were certain circumstances beyond the game proposed by that expression, and that only with time and perseverance I would get to know.
Those images taken from comic magazines and newspapers, that homemade paste, that notebook with rigid covers of a pharmaceutical prescription book, were only the emergent beginnings of a "charm" for that collagistic task and that today allows me to say, with certainty, that my life has generally revolved around it.
I feel it as something of my own... perhaps the only thing that is really my own, for better or worse.
It is undoubtedly what I have in my hands to show, to give and to share.
I understand that it may not be understandable or shareable, but it's an honest way of being and feeling my life... My world is collage, it represents me and gives voice and image to my ideas and opinions.
From those primary cut out images of Tarzan and the Phantom located in places and situations outside their usual habitats, I have moved through the Collage, just temporarily away to venture into mixed media, where also the use of a "collage strategy" was not absent.
Being in the "plane" with the collage I always thought about the expressive possibility of the volume, no longer suggested... I saw it visible, tangible, although it was not easy for me to find that entrance door towards its investigation and realization... but with time, more precisely a lot of time, I saw not very far from my sight that possibility and between "enthusiasm and ignorance" I walked towards it.
When I crossed it, an infinite panorama opened up where that idea of volume made me get entangled in 3D, popup, artist's books (an area that was not completely unknown to me) and cardboard sculpture and there from there the need to know well to dig into the knowledge and not grope to play again and find new expressive paths always with "bones and sinews" of Collage was made flesh.
In these paths of learning, my trips to the Valencian Country were fundamental, where I met works and artists who had and still have a lot to tell me... Toni Miró, Andreu Alfaro, Joana Francés, Manolo Millares, Fuencisla Francés, Joan Brossa, Antoni Tàpies, Miquel Navarro?
My present is in that... walking, wandering and finding... in an enchanting work that determines me many hours of daily work in my world and from where I am to integrate it to the community life as a worker, an employee, a teacher, a nurse, a merchant and others, in pursuit of better communal moments, each one from his own."
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¡Muchas gracias por la entrevista, Rodolfo!
Thanks a lot for the Interview, Rodolfo!
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Shirley Rebuffo has a Degree in Library Science and a Degree in Archivology by the Universitary School of Library and Related Sciences (Montevideo, Uruguay), Technician in Museology by the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences (Anthropology option), Object, Symbol and Spance in Curatorship Applied Museology and Social Museology - Concepts, Technics and Practice (Campo Grande, Brazil), Coaching (Campo Grande, Brazil), Strategic Planning (Campo Grande, Brazil), and Art and Painting student under Master Eduardo Espino.
