HUGO TORO

The following essay was written by Guillaume Kientz, Director ofthe Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York.

Born in Eastern France to a Mexican mother and a French father,Hugo Toro carries within him the duality of his identity like anintimate enigma that he seeks to resolve on the canvas. This internalfriction, born of two distinct worlds, serves as the primary enginefor his creative process. His work is not merely an aestheticexercise but a profound ontological investigation into what it meansto belong to two places at once, and perhaps, in the end, to belongfully to neither except through the act of creation.

His telluric palette purposefully blurs the traditional boundariesbetween abstraction and figuration. Much like the dense jungles heconstructs through layers of paint, his compositions borrow fromthe register of a Mexico that is simultaneously fantasized and real.It is a visual poetry written in prose, delivered in the first person.Toro’s “landscapes” are psychological mappings. He invites theviewer into a space where the earth and waters merge and seemto breathe, slowly.

The mangroves that interweave their complex roots in his paintingsspeak, above all, of his own origins. They represent a Mexico wherehe never lived, a place that exists for him as a powerful phantom—at once distant and incredibly present through his mother’s vividstorytelling, memories of family vacations, and the domesticmythologies centered around his ancestral village in Oaxaca. Theseroots are not fixed in the ground; they are semi-aquatic, shifting,and tangled, mirroring the fluid nature of his heritage.

Instinctive, even animalistic in his approach, Toro gives form to thissensory, interior, and mysterious universe so that he might betterexplore it. He navigates the river of his origins, moving upstreamwithout a fixed destination, yet certain that every stroke brings him closer to the core of who he is. There is a palpable tension in hiswork between the existential anxiety of the unknown and theenveloping, benevolent warmth of a familiar world that onerecognizes without ever truly knowing. This duality creates a uniqueemotional resonance; it is the feeling of coming home to a placeyou are visiting for the first time.

He progresses through the heavy waters of fragmented narratives,half-remembered readings, and lingering dreams. His workoscillates between melancholy and joy, fear and excitement. This isperfectly captured in the concept of his “murmuring waters,” atheme explored in his recent exhibition at the Mexican CulturalInstitute in Paris. These waters are not silent; they carry the echoesof a heritage that demands to be heard, even if the language itspeaks is one of impressions rather than definitions.

As an artist, Toro is wary of the urge to be merely illustrative orliteral. To combat this, he often turns to large-scale formats. Thevastness of the canvas helps to abolish traditional architecturalspace, allowing the work to become its own autonomousenvironment. In these moments of creation, the canvas is the onlyspace that truly matters to him. It is a sanctuary where the physicalworld recedes, leaving only the artist and his internal vision.

He refers to these spaces as his “limbos”—a state existing betweentwo worlds and two realities. Within these limbos, he seeks toreconcile the image with the impression, imagination with memory,and the real with the dreamt. This liminal space is where he trulyresides. He is a Mexican whose body grew in France, but whosespirit has always been nurtured by the essence of Mexico. Thecanvas becomes the bridge between these two states of being, asite of resolution.

His fabrication and specific use of pigments—what he terms his“pigmentogenesis”—play a vital role in this quest. These pigmentsare the ingredients of his search, the tactile equivalents of hispsychological journey. They are composite, thick, and intense, yetthey possess a fragility that mirrors the nature of memory and thesubconscious. They are heavy with the weight of history but asfleeting as a reminiscence.

In many ways, these pigments are the words of a mother tonguethat he does not speak well enough to fully inhabit his identity.Where words fail, the physical medium of paint succeeds. Paintingprovides him with the abstract vocabulary needed to articulate hiscomplex emotions. It offers him—or perhaps restores to him—thelanguage of his roots. There, again are the mangroves, the floatingroots of a fluid identity, a constant process of growth and movementthat never ceases to draw and redraw the contours of his profound,complex interior landscape. Through this, Toro does not just painta world; he births a self.

Courtesy Perrotin.