Belchite/South Bronx: A Trans-Cultural and Trans-Historical Landscape, 1987

A series of videos from the early 1970s exemplifies the practice of action and the use of the body itself and its circumstances. Artists such as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci are fine examples of this. However, Torres chiefly uses action, or performance, as an experiment in which we can find the start of what will be the constant leitmotiv of his oeuvre starting from the late 1960s: memory as a terrain for constructing politics. An Attempt To Decondition Myself (1974) and Almost Like Sleeping (1975) precisely capture the moment of paradigm shift via an action that reveals an initiation ritual. In An Attempt To Decondition Myself, for example, the artist shows an action in which essentially he will drink until he loses consciousness due to alcohol intoxication. […] The need to perform painful or ecstatic actions in order to achieve a higher (or different) state of being has been a common subject since the dawn of the history of civilisations and has become part of religious feeling. Torres, however, acts out of not mystical but social motivations. His is a rite that seems to condemn the conditions of a culture of hypocrisy, as he will further explore in later works. However, the shift in the axis around which his work pivots had to be made by a staging that stars the artist himself: he stages a rupture and briefly breaks the long episode of para-scientific inquiry.

Bartomeu Marí: Francesc Torres, catàleg de l’exposició Da Capo, realitzada al MACBA l’any 2008.