KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is pleased to present POEMS, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ecuadorian-born, New York based artist Boris Torres on view at 561 Grand Street, NYC 10002 from November 12 to December 13, 2025, with an opening reception on Friday, November 14, from 5 to 8 pm.

Spanning works created in the past year, Poems reveals Torres’s ongoing exploration of intimacy, desire, and representation through a cinematic yet impressionistic lens.

Unlike his past exhibitions, which drew together diverse imagery with the energy of a carnival, Poems is unified in mood and approach.  These paintings do not dwell on the explicit; rather, they linger on facial expressions and figures that carry tenderness and longing. By drawing fragments from erotic films and softening them into dreamlike compositions, Torres “smuggles” queer imagery into the frame of contemporary painting, transforming what was once unwelcome, into quiet declarations of love, connection, and shared humanity.

At the center of the exhibition is Splendor (2025), a painting of two nude figures poised at the edge of a dock, about to leap into water. Rendered in blurred, atmospheric strokes, the scene recalls European traditions of bathers in nature, yet Torres subtly shifts the frame: here, intimacy is not cloaked in allegory but directly acknowledged. The work is typical of this new body of paintings, tender, and suffused with mystery, where desire and companionship are expressed through gesture and mood. In Splendor, as throughout POEMS, Torres asks viewers to linger in the moment before immersion, in the tension between anticipation and release.

Torres’s figures are enveloped in sweeping marks and scratches that resist preciousness. These painterly interventions imbue the works with imperfection, echoing the way memory distorts and softens lived experience. Through cropping, expanding, and reworking his source images, Torres renders away from replication, images altered by his hand become spaces for new and unexpected reflection.

The exhibition title, POEMS, underscores the lyrical sensibility in Torres’s process, where each work bears a single-word title that evokes the personal and intimate nature of these delicate stories. Across these canvases, bodies of diverse forms appear with a grounded and earthy palette. These quiet, subtly subversive works, witness, sometimes within reach of what we desire, sometimes as observers at a distance, the fleeting yet profound moments of connection that make us human.

Boris Torres (b. 1976, Ecuador) received his MFA in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College and his BA from Parsons School of Design. A Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellow and artist resident at the Virginia Center for the Arts, Torres has exhibited widely in museums and galleries including The Bronx Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Cheim & Read. His work is held in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Ecuador. Torres’s paintings have been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Out Magazine, as well as in films and television including Keep the Lights On, Love Is Strange, American Horror Story, and Only Murders in the Building. He is represented by Kates-Ferri Projects, New York.

Artist Statement: I was born in a small city in Ecuador and grew up working class, with little access to art or artistic role models. The few sensual paintings I encountered in church during mass became early portals of imagination and escape. Before adolescence, my mother and I immigrated to the United States seeking a better life. In New York City public schools, I struggled academically, but I was fortunate to cross paths with teachers who recognized my artistic ability and encouraged me to pursue it. Their support led me to LaGuardia High School, where I discovered a deep sense of purpose and direction in art making.

I am a New York artist through and through, yet at times I felt like an outsider. In the early 1990s, as a gay immigrant creating queer images, I worked against the backdrop of widespread homophobia and the losses of the AIDS crisis. Yet beneath the surface of Manhattan, in the clubs, on the piers, and among other queer artists and immigrants, I found a community that mirrored my own experience. In those spaces, I was granted permission to make work that felt both forbidden and necessary, a tension that continues to drive my practice today.

Over the years, my work has expanded across collage, painting, watercolor, and portraiture. Each medium offers new challenges and discoveries, allowing me to explore themes of desire, identity, and intimacy. My artistic lineage draws from artists who merged life and art, such as Alice Neel, Joe Brainard, and Patrick Angus, as well as from cinema, photography, sex, New York City, and the people around me.

Through these influences, I aim to unearth the layered complexities of human experience, our vulnerabilities, contradictions, and desires, creating images that provoke, challenge, and embrace. My work seeks to hold space for tenderness and transgression alike, revealing the beauty and fragility that connect us all.

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Video of exhibition on YouTube