Daniel Torres

Daniel Torres (Teresa de Cofrentes, Valencia, 1958), is one of the most important Valencian comic, an outstanding member of the artists who renewed the graphic narrative in the 80’s from the clear line aesthetic approaches.

Caso de Estudio. Daniel Torres. Shelter brings together one hundred original drawings selection and sketches that the author produced for Shelter. Chronicle of a conquest publication, edited by Norma Editorial in 2015. It will be exhibited complete Chapter 19, Three Motors, Chicago, 1918 (The Skyscraper) and Chapter 21, The Living-In Machine. Also, it has been selected original works from the rest of the book. All of them will be exhibited at IVAM’s Gallery 3. Both chapters chosen intertwine house evolution within cities growth that takes place in the early twentieth century, developing an analysis discourse of the impact on daily life of a translation from rural to urban concentration.

The exhibition includes eight small appliances from the Alfaro Hofmann collection of Godella because as Daniel Torres himself indicated in Chapter 23 From zero, anywhere in Europe: “Homes should not be places to mourn but celebrating places! And the decoration must also illuminate that new state of the spirit. The walls are painted with vivid plastic paints, and wallpapers with abstract motifs drawn from modern art are used”, and follows, “the size of such a jump in fifty years is disturbing. An army of appliances, leaked, like cars and buildings, from the assembly line, invades the house. These little machines will change the way we do things. And the way we think about them”.

Shelter is not a history book or a treatise on architecture, nor it is an anthropological essay or an interior design handbook, but it is a collection of different house histories from the beginnings of mankind to the present day, that have been constituted over the centuries. Daniel Torres explores man history and the relationship with his shelter, through extensive documentation and using the narrative agility provided by sequential art. A work that shows our life as it is: a great theatre in which we readers are also its privileged public.