Photograph: CELEBRATING LIFE: Rigoberto Torres is back on the Bronx arts scene. Photo Credit: Alexandra Bensaid.
By Sarah Hambro, Staff Reporter
After a year of debilitating illness, the artist Rigoberto Torres has returned with a retrospective exhibition of his works at Lehman College Art Gallery.
"This is the biggest test for myself to get back into the art world," Torres said. "I could have become a vegetable."
The exhibition, which runs through April 13, features works from 1979, when he started out, as well as sculptures finished after asthma halted his work.
Two severe attacks in 1993 put him into a two-day coma. When he woke up he was blind and didn't remember his own name.
He is still struggling to regain his balance, his full memory and eyesight.
"I'm getting to know myself and my skills all over again," he says.
"The Fortune Teller," a sculpture of a woman holding a crystal ball against the signs of the zodiac, is his latest work. Torres cast it before he fell ill, but painted it during his recovery.
The paint strokes are less deft, a little coarser than his naturalistic pre-illness works, but the brightly colored sculpture still exudes life.
"These are people from the Bronx who you see every day," said Rosanne Wille, senior vice president for academic affairs at Lehman. "You can look at this and feel the impact of their personalities."
If the style seems familiar, it's because several murals by Torres and his mentor and collaborator, John Ahearn, are scattered throughout the South Bronx, including the group of figures that hang on the corner of Dawson Street and Longwood Avenue.
Torres has left a mark on the borough, but his art would not exist if it were not for the South Bronx.
Torres, 34, was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York as a four-year-old. He grew up on Walton Avenue in Highbridge, where his mother still lives and where he keeps his old room as a studio. He moved to Manhattan last year, but said the Bronx is still his home.
He attended Morris High School and spent his free time helping out in his uncle's religious statue factory. In 1979, when he was 18, he met Ahearn, already established as a sculptor. He was doing plaster casts of bypassers in a storefront and cast Torres. Soon, the two were working together.
"John has a twin who is exactly 100 percent identical to him," Torres said, speaking of himself. "Anything he does, I copy. I'm his brother."
Ahearn has been Torres's teacher. But as art critic Dan Cameron wrote in an essay for the exhibition catalogue, "Torres took the techniques and opportunities offered by his partnership, and used them to define his life and situation."
And in an area scarred by burned-out buildings and graffiti, the residents have respected the two artists' work. Only one of their murals has ever been vandalized, Torres says.
