Glenda Torrado

Under a title with universal undertones, the artist presents her most recent album of creatures: Global Corpus. An unprecedented visual journey that explores new collections of bodies, making stops in the hybrid and forging connections within uncertainty. Among the wonders of the corpus, beasts, wild creatures, and human attributes weave naked alliances. Before the viewer’s eye, animal anatomies with anthropomorphic slips joyfully join a grand cast of characters.

Are Glenda Torrado’s inventions monstrous or humorous? Her pastels reveal that there is something deeply pleasurable in rendering those coats of fur, humps, beaks, or horns. Features that suddenly merge with the skin, folds, and poses of our own bodies, portrayed against a French tapestry, a Latin hillside, or a Persian rug...

In Glenda Torrado’s teratogenic album, the global flow of images ultimately gives birth to these monstrous bestiaries that seem to have escaped from the ingenious gardens of Bosch or from surreal, caricature-like vignettes, while also appearing to be self-portraits. Global Corpus is an inventory of coquettish chimeras that attempt to play with our gaze.

—Gustavo Gómez-Mejía