24/03/2025
THALASSA
Major Axis: 280 cm | Minor Axis: 153 cm | Depth: 30 cm
Medium: Expanded polystyrene. Fiberglass laminate with epoxy resin. Automotive-grade polyurethane enamel, acrylic, gesso, and oil paint.
Date of Creation: 2024–2025
Alberto de la Torre Mayado’s Thalassa: The Liquid Myth of Origin — A Topography for the Rotating Gaze
In a time when the flatness of thought seems to rival the flatness of screens, Mayado introduces a curved, living, almost orbital form that resists passive viewing. Thalassa — a semi-ellipsoidal pictorial body overflowing with color, vibration, and structure — is neither painting in the strict sense, nor sculpture; it is an entity. Or more precisely: a symbiotic presence between form, matter, and energy, a morphology seemingly extracted from the womb of a liquid planet or from an extracorporeal vision within a cosmic laboratory.
The artistic gesture here is far from ornamental. It is a form of plastic intelligence that toys with the conventions of the art object, destabilizing our perceptual coordinates. The deep, almost liturgical blue evokes a sea or an expanding sky, while the eruptive lower region — with undulating red forms — suggests a pulsing, tectonic lithosphere. Yet to reduce Thalassa to a representation of “nature” would be to submit to a reductive reading. This work operates as a sensorial artifact, placing us — in the words of Gaston Bachelard — within the material imagination of fire, water, and plasma.
Through his use of industrial materials — expanded polystyrene, fiberglass, polyurethane enamel — Mayado summons the unnatural to evoke the primordial natural. This tension between the artificial and the organic, between the science of compounds and the metaphor of the telluric, between technical precision and oneiric vision, is what lends the piece both its philosophical gravitas and its hypnotic strangeness.
As Robert Hughes might remind us, great art does not aim to please, but to transform the space it inhabits and the time it occupies. Thalassa is an object made for rotation — physical and mental. The gaze cannot remain static; it must orbit the work, trace its perimeter, surrender to the distortion of its curvature. There is something Copernican in this invitation to revolve around a visual core that seems charged with a sci-fi epiphany or an ancestral memory that exceeds us.
More than a work of art, Thalassa is an event: a chromatic and morphological apparition that — like certain ritual paintings of Indigenous cultures or the scientific experiments of the Soviet avant-garde — reminds us that art can still function as spiritual technology. In an era of immediacy and disposability, Mayado offers a surface that breathes slow time: a geology of perception, and above all, a poetic resistance to the symbolic impoverishment of the world.
