Lorena Torres, La Comehombres, 2024
Drifting between canvases, the icons, people, and creatures of Lorena Torres’ painterly worlds exist almost spectrally, between embodied legends and transient entities. Through the crafting of this personal universe of symbols, mythos, and localities, Torres explores her cultural identity and that of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. She forms a dialogue between memory and contemporaneity, storying her modern encounters with her local Columbian legends and histories. Considering machismo culture as if an influential and long-rooted cultural relic, Torres’ La mirada de Dios o el milagro es la pereza de Dios (The look of God or the miracle is the idleness of God) explores ways of reimagining gender dynamics by recentring women and female experience in folklore.
Inspired by the legend of El Hombre Caimán (The Alligator Man), La mirada de Dios o el milagro es la pereza de Dios (The look of God or the miracle is the idleness of God) works in tandem with Torres’ other painting from the same body of work, La Comehombres (The Maneater), to retell the fable through a feminist gaze. Almost emblematic of machismo culture’s machista (sexism), the Alligator Man tells of a man who uses potions to transform himself into an alligator in order to watch bathing women unnoticed, until the potion to transform him back into a man is spilled and he is left half man, half reptile. The legend focuses on his experience with social rejection after becoming stuck as a half-creature, outcast by everyone but his mother, as opposed to the potential didactic message of consequences for trespassing on the women’s privacy. Torres’ two paintings instead recenter the feminine, aligning the paintings and the legend with the long history of feminist resistance in Colombia.
La mirada de Dios o el milagro es la pereza de Dios (The look of God or the miracle is the idleness of God) shows an alligator with a small dog perched on his back and accompanied by a pair of heels, gazed down upon by the long-lashed eyes of a female god. In this context, the previously masculine and animalistic man-turned-caiman becomes a symbol of both man and woman. Devoid of gendering characteristics on the body of the alligator itself, the core of the figure’s inclusion becomes its role in the legend – at first a symbol of power, later a symbol of the downtrodden. Do the heels that accompany the creature, then, speak to the social status of women in a culture of machista, suggesting that only the men who have fallen from social grace can understand the female experience? Or perhaps is the granting of animalistic power the feminine god’s benevolence, freeing a woman from the trappings of social confines?
Taking the piece in tandem with La Comehombres (The Maneater), linked by the shared iconography of the legend and the small, red-collared dog, the feminist retelling continues. Wearing the skin of the crying caiman as a shroud, the maneater sits at home cradling her dog. Perhaps it’s her revenge on the sexually-incredulous machismos, overpowering them as opposed to being overpowered, or maybe it’s a view onto the inner self of the female caiman, thrown underfoot by the world around her. Both paintings work in tandem to renegotiate the locus of women in traditional culture – interrogating the validity of machismo and machista by the intentional blurring of the masculine with the feminine. Torres’ paintings create a multiplicity of interpretations through the combination of the familiar legends and the surreal, sowing a fertile ground for dialogue across her paintings and bodies of work. Through this fashioning, Torres’ practice inspires a questioning of the quotidian
(By Teddy Woods)