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Media - Painting
Email - [email protected]
Website - www.patriciomorenotoro.com
Toro began his art career as a self-taught watercolorist, selling his work at prestigious
galleries in Santiago and the annual Parque Forestal where one of his first steady customers was
Dr. Salvador Allende, who later became president of Chile. At the age of 16, he was in his
first solo show at Sala de Exposiciones de “El Diario Ilustrad” in Santiago.
In 1963, he exhibited solo at Galerie de Arte Taller 13 in Santiago and that same year, at age 19,
he won the coveted gold medal in watercolors in a national contest which was awarded during a
ceremony that took place at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valparasio, Chile.
During these early years, he worked prolifically, mastering watercolor techniques. Touted in Chile
as the "Golden Boy," he received excellent critical reviews and national prizes for his
work in watercolor.
In June 1966, at the age of 22, he embarked on a solo voyage to Europe, leaving behind a young
wife and a newborn son, in search of culture, new ideas and the possibility to enrich his
art. He left the port of Valparaiso on a ship called
the Donisetti destined for Barcelona, Spain. Arriving in Spain a month
later, he remained in Barcelona for the next two month and through a set of extraordinary
circumstances met one of Spain’s foremost painters , José Guinovart, and his wife at
the time, Maria Antonia, through a mutual friend, Chilean poet, Nicolas Martin. He lived
with the couple for a few weeks and Guinovart helped him sell a few watercolors to earn his train
fare to Paris.
In France, Toro lived in cheap hotels or crashed in the homes of vague acquaintances while he
tried to sell his art. After a few precarious months, Nicolas Martin introduced him to
Chilean painter, Roberto Matta, then living in Paris. Matta took the young Toro under his wing,
introducing him to French philosopher, Andre Breton, who at the time was on his deathbed.
Through Matta, he also met artist, Max Ernst, and accompanied the two to galleries and the
opera. For a few months he became Matta’s assistant, friend and disciple. From the
maestro he learned the “whys” and “why nots" of painting, the purpose of
drawing a line, and the concept of generosity in art. Matta told the young artist (as told
in Spanish loosely translated): “If generosity isn’t spontaneous then it becomes
impossible to mold whatever it is you are trying to achieve in art. Don’t forget that
the main ingredient of art is giving!” During the last couple months that he stayed in
Paris, Toro had the pleasure to serve as a personal caretaker for Matta’s son, Jean, a
talented illustrator in his own right.
From Paris, Toro traveled to and lived in Hamburg, Germany for a couple months, but was
uninspired. From Germany, he traveled to Italy, arriving penniless in Rome in the dead of
winter, January 1967. In Rome, he immediately sought out director, Roberto Rosellini, whom
Toro had met at a party in Santiago two years earlier when introduced by a friend and collector of
his watercolors, Ines Peretti. Toro has obtained Rosselini’s personal contact
information when he arrived at the Santiago party, watercolor in hand to give to the director
whose work he greatly admired.
Toro stayed in Italy for eleven months, earning money and favors by trading his paintings and
acting as an extra in Rosselini’s documentary films and several other feature films,
including spaghetti Westerns. During this time in Rome he met Inger Falck, who would
later become his second wife. Together the two left Italy in December 1967 and hitchhiked to her
home in Sweden.
Settling together in the small village of Strassa, Sweden, Toro began painting large canvases in
oils, experimenting with hexagonal -shaped canvases and new abstract forms. Within a month
the city of Norastad bought one of his first large oil paintings and Toro’s career as an
international artist blossomed. At one of his early exhibits in Sweden, he met the artist,
Alf Olsson, with whom he would establish a life-long friendship. Olsson contacted Leif Nielsson,
who owned several galleries in Sweden and Denmark. In 1970, Toro produced seven shows in
Sweden and Denmark, showing at the Prisma Galleries in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Sundvall and at
the Aguélimuséet in Sala. By sheer coincidence, his mentor Roberto Matta,
who was showing simultaneously at the Moderna Musset in Stockholm, attended Toro’s opening,
heaping praise on the younger man.
Upon hearing of the death of his mother, in September 1970, Toro moved back to Chile, arriving the
day before Salvador Allendes’ election in time to cast his vote. He and Inger rented a
small house in Santiago and Toro set up a studio on the upper floor. At the time, his friend
and mentor, Nemesio Antúñez was the Director of the National Museum of Fine Arts in
Santiago. He offered Toro the honor of representing Chile in the 1972 Paris Biennale and a
solo show at the museum. One of the paintings that Toro entered in the Biennale was acquired
by Pablo Neruda who donated it to the Chilean Embassy in Paris.
His 1971 show at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago opened to critical acclaim- large
oil paintings of skinless figures both in repose and in motion, organs and intestines prominently
exposed, raw as if post-autopsy- as if the paintings were made through a time-traveled partnership
between Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon
Several months before the September 1973 coup d’etat against President Allende, Toro left
Chile again this time with his new wife, Inger, and his seven-year-old son, Gabriel, in tow.
The family lived in Sweden until 1974 when they made their way through Europe, settling first in
Barcelona and then in nearby Sitges. During these years, Toro produced a large number of paintings
that were acquired and shown by Miguel Gaspar, co-owner of Sala Gaspar in Barcelona, one of the
oldest galleries in Spain that also showed the works of Picasso, Dali, Gris, Miro and other famous
moderns, and the emerging artists of the time, like Bartolocci. In Sitges,
Toro reunited with his mentor Nemesio Antúñez, then a political exile from Chile.
José Donoso, a writer and also a Chilean exile, wrote Toro’s catalogue for his show
at Galeria D’Alaro in Sitges. During this time, Toro occupied the former studio of
impressionist painter, Claude Monet.
Separating from his second wife, Inger, in 1976, Toro traveled to England and lived in a small
town near Oxford, continuing his painting for five months. From there he traveled to
Capetown, South Africa where he continued to paint and show his work. In 1977, Toro
arrived in Israel where he had a show at Delson Richter Gallery in Jaffe. He stayed in
Israel for seven month where he met sculptress and art patron, Ilana Goor. It was through
Ms. Goor that he received an invitation to show his work for the first time in the United
States. In 1978, he had a solo show at the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles,
California.
He stayed in Los Angeles, becoming involved in the fashion and film industry after he met his
third wife, designer Constance Rivemale. In 1981, he exhibited in a two-man show with
artist, Chris Burden, at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. He left Los Angeles in 1982, moving
to Berkeley, California where he continued to paint and show his work.
In 1983, he met African-American artist Mary Lovelace O’Neal, an internationally known
artist and art professor at University of California, Berkeley. They became friends and
professional colleagues and eventually married. Living in Oakland, for a time Toro worked in
the studio of artist, Oliver Jackson, and taught for a semester at California State
University-Sacramento while Jackson was working in Carrara, Italy. It was there that Toro
began to paint large unstretched canvases and the Terra Nostra series was
born.
The next turning point in Toro’s career was when he met Rolando Castellón, the former
curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and later the Director of the San Jose Museum of
Modern Art and Design in Costa Rica. Curating a traveling exhibition of Bay Area Chicano
and Latin American artists entitled Mano a Mano in 1988,
Castellón asked Toro to participate. In the show’s catalog,
Castellón wrote: “The content of Toro’s monumental work communicates his
interest in the elaboration of abstract impressionistic forms and deals with different aspects of
the flora in his native land. This work does not reflect nature in the way we know it, but rather
as he perceives it: a monochromatic metaphor in brown, black, or gray, that reveals obscure
passages symbolizing the human chaos and the dark political cloud which envelop current political
activity in Chile. The implication of this symbolism is not literal although sometimes his work
may contain delineated human figures in a violent context. The application of the pigments
on the canvas is free and energetic. His colors create a visual cadence of counterpoint
which encourages the spectator’s eye to observe the details enhancing the totality of the
work. The smell of burnt soil emanating from the pigmentation and the damp sinuosity of a
nature devoid of sunlight characterizes Toro’s enigmatic and aggressive work.
Contained within the work, too, is the intensity and the strengths of his idea and
feelings.” Mano a Manorotated with major success to the Modern Museum of Art,
Santa Ana California, the art museum of Santa Cruz County (California) and the Oakland Museum in
Oakland, California.
A couple years later the Oakland Museum exhibited Oakland’s Artists
‘90. Writing for Artweek in May 1990, critic Mark Van Proyen
reviewed the show: “ Because of the number and diversity of the work it is impossible
to do critical justice to every artist included. Although the majority of these are of the
emerging ilk, there are a few who have well-established reputations and can pass without further
comment, such as Bruce Beasley, David Bottini, Squeak Carnwarth, Viola Frey, Rupert Garcia, Mike
Henderson, Tom Holland, Marilyn Devine, Richard McLean, Mel Ramos, Raymond Saunders, Carlos Villa
and Peter Voulkos. … Many of the other artists included
in Oakland’s Artists ‘90 favor a large scale as a basis
for their expressive adventures. The largest and most ambitious painting in the show is
Patricio Toro’s Machu Pichu(1986-1987) and by my reckoning it is also the
best.”
In 1991 with his wife, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Toro curated and participated in the first
exhibit in Chile of African Americans and Latin Americans living in the USA. The show was at the
National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago and met with great success, selling the most tickets to
that date for the venue. Toro returned to Chile in 1992 for a major exhibit of his work at
the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Toro continued to travel and show his art work, living for
short periods in Senegal, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, among other countries,
and settling to live for a year in Paris. His work was represented in the Triennale
Mondial De L’Estampe Petit Format, an exhibition that traveled internationally from Paris to
museums throughout Europe, in 1994 and 1997.
Diversity was curated in 1997 by Toro’s long-time friend, Peter Selz,
professor emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; founding
director of the Berkeley Art Museum; noted art historian and a former curator of the
Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Toro exhibited four 10x10 foot canvases in the show at the Hugo de Pagano Gallery in New York. Of
Toro’s work, Mr. Selz wrote: “His work is informed by the biomorphic fantasy and
automatic procedures by his compatriot Matta, by the non-traditional working processes and use of
materials by Andre Masson, de Kooning’s great visual energy and the powerful shadows of
Caravaggio’s paintings or the turmoil in Turner’s paintings. His large
unstretched canvases of theTerra Nostra series were painted on the studio floor with
rags, sponges, rollers and hands. Although done with almost visceral spontaneity and without
preconceived ideas, they have narrative structure beneath their chaotic appearance. They suggest
fragments of human heads, birds, and all kinds of natural organic forms, as well as the color and
sensations of the Chilean landscape. The color-flux of these paintings also evokes nocturnal
views of natural cataclysms. These large Action paintings are like the acrobatic feasts of
well-honed gymnasts which results in the appearance of easy maneuvers. They are explorations
by the artist enacted during the painting process and stand as vindications of Abstract
Expressionism or Tachism at a time when such styles are no longer part of the Postmodern
trends.”
In June 1997, a premier public exhibition of fourteen museum quality screen prints by major
artists was shown at the Bomani Gallery, owned by actor Danny Glover, in San Francisco. The
exhibit was in celebration of the centennial of American hero, Paul Robeson. Toro was one of
the twenty-three artists and writers represented in the show and in the limited edition
publication, Freedom Or Slavery: The Paul Robeson Portfolio published
by Alliance Graphics (Berkeley, Calif.) in 1998. Profits from the sale of the portfolio
benefited the Middle East Children's Alliance. The portfolio was acquired by several
educational institutions including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The Introduction to
the portfolio by Howard Levine of Alliance Graphics provided this analysis of Toro’s work:
“The legacy of slavery is central to Ascención by Patricio
Toro… Toro’s abstract work swirls and distorts the schematic, perhaps reflecting how
slavery itself has twisted the lives of African-Americans ever since.”
In 2005 Toro returned to Chile to seek medical care for cancer, staying mostly in his
studio in Concón, Chile, and intermittently traveling back and forth to California.
During these years he created the Malabaristas Manuales, a controversial series of
etchings and paintings, work that explores the core of sexuality.
During one of his sojourns back to California in 2010, Toro participated in
the Rehistoricizing project spearheaded by artist and Guggenheim Fellow, Carlos
Villa. As part of this project he gave an extensive videography of his history in, and
impressions of, the art world. As part of this project he showed a piece in a group
exhibition of artists at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, California.
He returned to California in 2011 for a successful round of treatment for recurrent cancer.
He currently divides his time between Oakland, California, Nayarit, Mexico,
and Concón, Chile, working collaboratively with California attorney and artist,
Elizabeth Saviano.
Toro's work is currently represented in the traveling exhibition We Are You Project
International. He was selected to participate in 2012 as one of the most
prominent Latin American artists living in the United States. Of Toro's work
represented in the exhibition is this summary:
“Chilean-born artist Patricio Moreno-Toro's image entitled Sud Africa metaphorically
examines South Africa's late-20th Century human rights struggle against apartheid.
This insightful and expressive work emotively measures the "real" cost of civil rights,
human rights, the right-to-vote, and other prerequisites of a free-society, gauging the price of
these rights in terms of freedom and death. Today, as state-after-state passes unjust laws that
diminish the Constitutional rights of Latinos, Toro's 1988 image holds direr and prophetic 21st
Century warnings, presaging Latinos living in Alabama, Arizona, and other states where Latino
civil-liberties are currently unfairly trampled.
German
phenomenologist Martin Heidegger argued that real "freedom" necessitates a deep
meditation (or direct confrontation) with death. According to Heidegger, only a face-to-face
awareness of death can breed authentic-freedom (accounting for an innate or inherent
sense-of-freedom within each human being). Heidegger's ideas are almost identical to those of
Federico Garcia-Lorca's Theory of the Duende (1933), ascribing a "here-and-now"
(present) confrontation with Saturnal Death as the source of the rarest and most precious form of
artistic creativity: duende ("WHAT IS DUENDE" http://duende-art.com/page1.html), which
signifies a mano-a-mano encounter with Death, prompting true FREEDOM and mega
"creativity." Thus, this unique yearning for Thanatos ("death") ultimately
inspires or provides in all freedom seekers a selfless willingness to die for freedom. This
inimitable "freedom/death" matrix places a fearless Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at
the head of a dozen perilous US Civil Rights protests against segregation; as well as rousing
César Chávez to form a Chicano migrant-workers' union (the National Farm Workers
Association (NFWA)) to fight for "La Causa" the rights of Latino workers, by his
organizing intrepid "huelgas" against large commercial fruit-grower conglomerates, or
causes the heroic Nelson Mandela to rise-up against injustice in South Africa, risking everything
for the sake of FREEDOM.
In Moreno-Toro's 1988 Sud Africa, the
above-described Heideggerean amalgam of Thanatos and Liberty is reflected in the monotype, echoing
events that occurred in South Africa in 1988, where bombs exploded (each day) throughout the
nation, filling rooms with smoke and death, escalating an anarchic national-crisis, resulting in
the 1990 liberation of Nelson Mandela from prison, as well as in 1993, termination of South
Africa's official racial-apartheid system. In this light, Toro's duende-filled monotype offers an
image of a televised news-broadcast wherein a glib TV "talking-head" is suddenly caught
within a contiguous explosive "push-pull" milieu, asserting an organic-abstract
Neo-Surreal and Informalist composition that indirectly alludes to frenetic black-&-white
Surreal images painted by Toro's fellow Chilean artist, Roberto Matta Echaurren.
Through his virtuoso monotype image, Toro simultaneously melds or fuses a
real-time TV newscast with a "just-detonated" actual NEWS-event vividly occurring before
shocked-viewers gathered-around a levitating TV-set! These blown up highly-abstract viewers are
reminiscent of humanoid beings that haunt the contemporary art works by Jorge de la Vega, Luis
Felipe Noé, Jacobo Borges, Luis Caballero, and other late-modern Latin American masters of
Neo-figuration.
Toro's 1988 monotype affords many helpful lessons
about how disenfranchised people can begin to resist oppression. Due to the bevy of harsh 21st
Century anti-Latino laws rising in Arizona, Alabama, and other states, the above-described listing
of late-20th Century socio-political struggle(s) are important today, because the We Are You
Project provides a modicum of hope against the onslaught of ethno-racist prejudices, unjust laws,
and other rightwing affronts currently aimed at Latinos.
A student
of acclaimed Chilean artist Nemesio Antúñez in Santiago (Chile), Toro has lived and
worked in Paris (France), New York City (NY), and currently resides in Oakland (CA). Technically,
Toro's monotypes owe a great deal to the late-African-American printmaker Robert Blackburn's
acclaimed Printmaking Workshop, New York City (NY). In 1992, curator Rolando Castellon stated,
"The implications of Toro's symbolism is not literal, although sometimes his work may contain
delineated human figures in a violent context."
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