TORRES PIÑA AUGUSTO

 

AUGUSTO TORRES PIÑA

He was born on June 19th., 1913 with a thunder storm in Cataluña, Spain. He was quiet and silent. The simplicity of great deeds and actions seems to be registered in his drawings, murals, paintings.  Once he told his friend Guido Castillo (who wrote a book on Augusto Torres’ painting from 1927 to 1984) that when he was a boy he liked to observe certain things from reality. And then, when he was away from them and alone in his room, he liked to draw in different ways the images that those visions had made appear into himself (this was on October 1984 in New York).  Because he said that he probably wanted to be faithful to that reality and at the same time feel free from it. And he said that all during his life he had felt that way.

                                                  *********

What is painting?.-

Painting is like poetry. It is like a secret and we can only get to know by contemplation, in silence, deep inside ourselves colours will enter to let us know many other things. Perhaps what was also deeply hidden into the painter’s soul. This is the way to the soul of the painting. Good paintings have a soul.  And only the future will confirm it.  Because men will continue their contemplation, trying to know what poetry is hidden there, like a secret.

In Augusto Torres’ paintings we may discover the spirit of things through a synthetic and true representation. Painting is a language that can only be pronounced to tell an experience. Language is symbolic, painting too. Both are different languages, ways of symbolization for the expression of feelings and ideas. Words and plastic elements are the tools of those languages. The painter must translate his ideas into plastic language, which is not the mere description, but the bringing out of a new reality: the reality of the painting itself.