Girl with Red Halter Top

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Created in 1983, Girl with Red Halter Top, is a rich example of Rigoberto Torres’s early work of creating life-casts with neighborhood subjects, reflecting the artist’s ability to identify with his sitters, giving them a level of trust and comfort as they were begin cast. A sense of place is also central to Torres’ sculpture practice with John Ahearn, born out of a desire (still present to this day) to capture a collective feeling of the South Bronx and “the intelligence that goes into not only surviving the streets but making them feel like home.” Dan Cameron also notes that Torres was and continues to be particularly adept at “recreating his world as a way of coming to terms with forces that rage all around him but in doing so he also builds a convincing case for identity being based on the place we occupy in the world-view of those around us. Sooner or later in one form or another, everyone learns to struggle for his or her survival; but it is usually during those moments in between—moments of contemplation, celebration or love—when the people who we really are finally catch up with us.” In 1980, Torres and Ahearn began casting together on Walton street where Torres lived with his parents and Ahearn eventually moved. Torres had previously learned to make plaster casts in his uncle Raul’s religious statuary shop, C&R Statuary Corp. The street is where most of the early casting took place, drawing crowds and soliciting volunteers. Their process was duplicative, each cast made twice, one for the sitter and one for exhibition/sale. Early works were displayed on the building where a casting event took place, a practice that eventually led to commissions for their three iconic public murals within in the community: Homage to the People of the Bronx: Double Dutch at Kelly Street (1981–82), We Are Family (1981–82), and Life on Dawson Street (1982–83), all depicting groups of people at leisure and play. Torres’ background in creating religious statuary at C & R Statuary Corp. can be seen as a major aesthetic influence on his work. Hung directly on the wall, Girl with a Red Halter gives what Hilton Als describes as a conversant religious experience, “vivid and alive, those heads, like icons in a church devoted to a new kind of Jesus, hip and sporting ecclesiastical jeans. Looking up at them, you felt their presence so strongly that it was as if the subjects were speaking to you, like neighbors on your stoop telling the story of us.” His work has also been noted as reminiscent of the polychrome statues of the ancient Greek and Roman world and while conversant with the realism of his contemporaries Duane Hanson or George Segal, Torres’s coloration appears to be as much about painting as sculpture. The deep browns and reds of Girl with a Red Halter recall the brushstrokes of paint on a canvas.

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