Rosa Torres in “La Nau”

La Nau Cultural Centre is filled with colour. The headquarters of the University of Valencia received last Thursday the Forests and Mountains. Rosa Torres’ Nature exhibition, a retrospective of the work of the Valencian painter with twenty large-format works, most of them not previously displayed in Valencia. A review on the evolution of the artist, who took part in the Valencian avant-garde of the 1970’s and who produced works for the Sen gallery in Madrid, where he was a member of Equipo Crónica, is intended with this exhibition.

The commissioner of the exhibition, Martí Domínguez, stressed the «faithfulness of the author to the landscape», even though landscape painting is considered to be a second-class kind of art in some spheres. In words of the commissioner, Rosa Torres has carried out a «research» on landscape, a «summary and condensation of feelings» which make Torres’ work a special kind of painting, easily recognisable, where shapes and colours play a major role. Martí Domínguez points out the love of the artist for the Valencian land and the mountains of the Maestrat mountain range, a characteristic which can be easily checked if we take into account that «nobody had ever before painted the Penyagolosa mountain, the milestone, the emblem of the Valencian people». «Rosa Torres analyses the Valencian geography in a work connected to Cézanne’s paintings and gets to pull out the soul of the Montgó and Montcabrer peaks». In Forests and Mountains. Rosa Torres’ Nature, the visitor will be able to find a handful of pictures that have never been exhibited in Valencia, a great deal of them from her early work. This way we can take notice of the artist’s change in style, which has evolved towards the use of warm and intense colours, captured on the canvas, increasingly using the organic stroke.

«In Forests and Mountains. Rosa Torres’ Nature the visitor will be able to find a handful of pictures that have never been exhibited in Valencia, a great deal of them from her early work»

All in all, Rosa Torres pointed out that, for her « what is interesting is not the landscape in itself, but the interpretation of the image, the composition of its shapes, colours, lines and layers». This working method, in which the artist can make up to fifty sketches previous to the final work, is what makes a difference of Torres’ work, according to the art critic Francesc Miralles. «Torres is one of the few contemporary artists that follows the roots of painting, not letting herself be carried away by other superficial traits of painting», explained the art critic. «For her, the aesthetic sense of the picture is not as important as the colour theory. Rosa Torres explores colour gradation to find a merging point; she carries out a colour theory very few artists execute nowadays».

Rosa Torres’ work is based on all this. Torres contributes to the illustration of Mètode‘s next summer issue, devoted to Mediterranean coves. Moreover, the painter revealed that she does not leave anything «to chance», and  asserts that every detail in every one of her pictures «is thoroughly thought beforehand». «My work», the artist points out, «is close to the work writers do, who write and rule out some of their drafts until getting to the final story». Visitors who go to La Nau will be able to check this creation routine by themselves thanks to the interesting collection of sketches (60), where one can see the detailed analysis of the landscape, reducing it to mere shapes and colours, getting really close to abstraction.

José Vicente Bernabeu. Student of Journalism at the University of Valencia.
© Mètode 2012.

«Rosa Torres analyses the Valencian geography in a work connected to Cézanne’s paintings and gets to pull out the soul of the Montgó and Montcabrer peaks» 
Martí Domínguez