Body Snatchers by Benjamín Torres: Curated by Rodrigo Torres Ramos at Main Room

Public space is that indeterminate place in which infrastructure and social relations come together: a strictly operated, regulated, and monitored territory, although equally shaped by the mass media. This setting, a space in permanent transformation, is also Benjamín Torres' space for exploration and research.

Body Snatchers continues a long-term investigation, focused on the compilation of visual materials found in the public spaces of cities such as Tokyo, Paris and CDMX. For this project, Torres has focused his attention on characters and caricatures, as well as on the monuments and commemorative sculptures ubiquitous in Mexico City, all found in his wanderings.

In a city that constantly reconsiders the validity and relevance of public art, the eleven sculptures presented dislocate the observer's relationship with his preconceived notion of a monument, generally associated with its function as an aesthetic, symbolic and representative device of subjects or events relevant to the construction of a national identity. Thus, the hybridization of official and unofficial characters activated by the artist becomes a sculptural proposal that enables other types of use, sense, and significance of what occupies the public space.

Confronting the carefree perception of the environment from the experience of the flâneur - the urban individual that walks aimlessly - with the careful differentiation between the made object and the readymade, Torres reworks the demarcations found - a practice that structures different moments of his recent production -, enabling the bidirectional transit from the image to the object; in his own words “from the walls to the pedestals.”

The dislocation of the aesthetic and political sense - both in the source materials as of the definition of a monument - evidences the sense of continuation intended with multiple moments and stories in the history of art, particularly with those that allow us to address fundamental concepts such as authorship or appropriation and whose broad temporal space includes pieces from the Moche culture, Dadaist collages or contemporary interventions on Confederate monuments.

This interest is materialized from the display of twelve images that outline the trace of a genealogy proposed by the artist as an approach to incision, caricature, graffiti and civic sculpture from its intersections with different aspects associated with the unofficial, the fringes and otherness, evident in the appearance of works such as Linder Sterling's post-punk collages; the mysterious polychrome essays of Giacometti, the satirical and pre-modern sculptures of Daumier or the fatal faces of Son Ford.

The study of two formal typologies - the bust and the statuary - in conjunction with the reappropriation of characters found through drawing, silkscreen, digital modeling, and bronze casting allow Torres to assign new embodiments to the demarcations found, collapsing the fringes between the residual and the colossal. This juxtaposition of elements results in forms and images that oscillate between the humorous and the gross and place the Body Snatchers project within a critical narrative around the placement of monuments in public space.

— Rodrigo Torres Ramos