ROME.- The new series of works presented by Rodrigo Torres emerges from a two-month artistic residency developed between c.r.e.t.a., Rome’s leading center for ceramic arts, where the works were produced, and rhinoceros, where the sculptures and collages were completed.

Born and raised in Tijuca, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro historically shaped by the proximity of the forest and the coexistence of urban development and nature, Torres has developed a practice deeply informed by the tensions between growth and erosion, permanence and decay.

The sculptures investigate processes of transformation and return. Minerals extracted from the earth are elevated into monumental forms, only to eventually fragment and return to the ground through the combined action of natural forces and human intervention. This reflection emerges from Torres’ direct experience of the Tijuca Forest, where towering trees collapse, mountainsides erode under the action of wind and water, fungi spread across fallen trunks, and seeds proliferate in continuous cycles of regeneration. As the artist observes, “what the earth gives, it also reclaims.”

In Rome, Torres encountered an almost opposite condition. The city appears suspended in a continuous effort to resist the passage of time. Cracks are repaired, surfaces preserved, and structures reinforced in an attempt to postpone deterioration and collapse. The sculptures inhabit this tension, questioning the stability of their own forms while suggesting an ever-present possibility of disintegration.

Alongside the sculptures, a series of trompe-l’œil paintings conceived as collages translates the artist’s sculptural language into two dimensions. Material forms are fragmented into overlapping planes, extending the investigation of structure, instability, and transformation.

The exhibition also marks a significant shift in the artist’s approach to surface and color. Departing from his usual glazed ceramic technique—in which pigments are permanently fixed through firing—Torres develops surfaces inspired by Roman marble imitation painting and frescoes encountered throughout the city. Applied directly onto the ceramic works and left unfired, these interventions preserve a more immediate and unstable pictorial quality, emphasizing process, fragility, and impermanence.

Through this dialogue between Rome and Rio de Janeiro, the exhibition unfolds as a reflection on matter, time, and transformation, bringing together distinct geographies and artistic practices in a sensitive investigation of cycles of construction, erosion, and renewal.