ANDREA TORRES BALAGUER

With Hopes, Wishes and Prayers, Andrea opens the door to a new chapter, intimate and deeply connected with the essence of her work. The series emerges from a complex, intimate, and revealing life process: the desire and struggle to become a mother. But this is not a literal autobiographical narrative. The images in this exhibition are allegories, a universal reflection on longing, waiting, and the strength required to sustain a dream. Each figure embodies an essential quality for navigating this journey: luck, resilience, hope, perseverance... Each title is an ingredient in a magical and fragile recipe, made of faith, time, pain, and love.

The photographs, in black and white, return to the artist’s signature analog aesthetic, but now the painted brushstroke over the face has been replaced by a more fragile and delicate intervention: fragments of gold leaf, applied by hand, as if they were magical dust. This new technique adds a symbolic and meditative layer to the work: the cracks shine, and what once seemed broken is revealed as an essential part of beauty. The flaws are not hidden but gilded instead, in a kind of emotional kintsugi.

The figures in these images are not portraits of women, but archetypes: faceless presences that embody the necessary strength to continue onwards. Each body is an icon of an emotion, an attitude, a hope planted. The tone is contained but luminous. There is no grandiosity, only an emotion that matures over time. There is no naivety in these images, but a powerful affirmation of strength as an act of resistance.

Andrea Torres Balaguer has transformed her own experience, the persistent and loving search to become a mother, into an open-ended series, where each image is a station in the journey. But its value doesn’t lie in the personal narrative, but in how she manages to translate it into a collective reading. On the path towards our deepest desires, whether motherhood, freedom or a more meaningful life, there are invisible learnings. Hopes, Wishes and Prayers is, at its core, a celebration of process, of slowness, of all which takes time to grow. It’s an invitation to honour the journey and the qualities that push us to move forward. Even when the destination feels far away, even when everything seems uncertain, there is a small light, inside us, that keeps on burning.