gettare la spugna

I can say that Mario García Torres follows the tracks of some lucky colleagues with a three-word name: Félix González-Torres, James Lee Byars, Cerith Wyn Evans, Gino De Dominicis, Alighiero e Boetti.
It was precisely through Alighiero that we met on Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, where Fondazione Cini was holding one of his shows: minimum/maximum. Boetti’s research, as is known, was strongly linked to the concept of time, and it is actually funny to think that, throughout the course of history, Mario has spent years exploring Boetti’s legacy.
More generally, the starting point of Mario’s work has often been an incomplete story, followed by thorough research into the great conceptual masters and sometimes even the completion of incomplete works of art; this is, in a certain way, far from obvious considering that this young man’s CV includes solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the great exhibition at the Walker Art Center, then transferred to the Wiels in Brussels.
Illusion has often led him to draw a blurry line between original and re-enactment, past and present, the truth and artistic fiction, to play around with successful events and mirages that have made him undertake personal, and yet also collective, journeys, bound to the conceptual tradition, provocative towards the public.
As a result, Alighiero dematerializes and the only thing that remains of his portrait Mi fuma il cervello is the tube which, in this show, drenches discarded sponges that suddenly become very heavy.
Anyway, Mario accepted our invitation not to take himself, or us for that matter, too seriously. We have put most of our energy into the couple of sculptures that await you at the entrance, articulated between an expected functionality and its unexpected opposite. They are there to welcome you and to enrapture you, one more time.

Massimo Minini