Sebastián Torres | UMBRA|ES
Sebastián Torres
Logo Umbrales ARCHITECT & VISUAL ARTIST

SEBASTIAN
TOWERS

TRANSMUTATION

BIOGRAPHY

Sebastián Torres is an architect and visual artist. He was born in Pachuca, Hidalgo, and currently lives and works in Mexico City. His practice unfolds at the intersection of painting, energy, perception, and space, understanding art as a lived experience and a means of sensitive connection capable of generating emotional bonds and collective reflection.

He has exhibited his work in institutional venues such as the Museum of the Palace of Autonomy of the UNAM and the World Football Museum of the Pachuca Group, as well as in individual and collective exhibitions in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of the State of Hidalgo and various independent spaces in Mexico City.

He has given lectures on art and architecture at the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo.

His work has engaged with diverse contexts and audiences, from the creation of the official portrait of the former governor of the State of Hidalgo, Omar Fayad Meneses, to the creation of pieces for the American actor and artist Drake Bell.

This breadth of registers reflects a flexible and transversal practice, capable of adapting to different scales and languages without losing conceptual coherence.

STATEMENT

Sebastián Torres's work approaches painting as a field of energy and perception rather than as a representational image. His practice investigates the relationship between consciousness, time, spirituality, and the human condition from a symbolic and contemporary perspective, where the pictorial is understood as a space of transition and transformation.

The process functions as a constant laboratory for technical experimentation. He works with oil, acrylic, airbrushing, and mixed media, centrally incorporating the use of the pendulum as a gestural tool.

This device allows him to record movement, energy, and controlled chance, becoming a distinctive feature of his visual language and a method for activating the work from bodily and temporal experience.

The series Transmutation (2025) delves into the processes of change that matter, consciousness, and space undergo. Far from proposing a linear narrative or a promise of enlightenment, the work is articulated as a journey through different states—origin, wonder, internalization, equilibrium, collapse, dimension, and coexistence—where the human, the abstract, the energetic, and the cosmic intertwine.

In this context, art is conceived as a space of containment and questioning. Change is neither imposed nor idealized, but rather revealed as a natural, continuous, and, in many cases, silent process that manifests itself in the very experience of painting.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

THE WORK AS A FIELD OF IMMANENCE
From the outset of this process, Sebasti's work has been defined not as an image or a closed object, but as a field of immanence. Painting ceases to be surface and becomes thickness, a territory where everything occurs on the same ontological plane. There is no symbolic "beyond" nor a hierarchy between the visible and the invisible. The spiritual, the material, the corporeal, and the technological coexist without separation. The work refers to nothing else. It simply is.
STATE OF PRESENCE AND WILLINGNESS TO PROCESS
Sebasti's practice is articulated from a state of presence that is neither monumental nor stable, but rather processual. Each work embodies a will to process, made up of journeys, displacements, exposures to the environment, material mutations, and accumulated decisions. The work is not presented as the final result of this process, but as the sedimented process, always susceptible to reactivation. There is no closure or definitive form.
LAYERS, STRATIFICATION AND REVELATION
Formally and conceptually, the work is built in layers. These layers do not function as decoration or arbitrary accumulation, but as strata of experience. The interpretation is never immediate. It demands time, proximity, and sustained attention. Each revealed layer opens another, generating a depth that is not spatial, but perceptual. The work unfolds progressively, without ever fully revealing itself.
LIGHT, ACTIVATION AND LATENT TRUTH
A central aspect of this practice is the activation of light. The transition between white and black light does not introduce a spectacular effect, but rather a distinct ontological condition. Under certain circumstances, latent layers appear, the phosphor is activated, and hidden registers become visible. The work itself does not change. What changes is the condition of its appearance. The painting thus manifests itself as a temporal event, not as a fixed image.
PUTTING THE TRUTH INTO PRACTICE
The aesthetic and philosophical axis that articulates this reading is the enactment of truth, in the sense developed by Martin Heidegger. Truth is understood not as representation or correspondence, but as aletheia, as unconcealment. In Sebasti's work, truth is neither stated nor explained. It occurs in the relationship between matter, light, time, and perception. Each activation constitutes a new mode of truth, always partial and situated.
FRICTION, LABYRINTH AND EXPERIENCE
There is no definitive interpretation. The work operates through friction. Something resists, something emerges, something shifts. The volutes, spirals, and visual paths configure a labyrinth without a center, where the viewer doesn't decipher, but rather traverses. Meaning is not predetermined. It is constructed in the experience itself.
TRANSMUTATION AS AESTHETIC ETHICS
This entire system is ultimately articulated under the concept of transmutation. Matter, image, and perception undergo states. Nothing remains identical to itself. The work asserts itself as a living organism, open and available for new activations. Transmutation is not a represented theme, but an aesthetic ethic of becoming.

CONCEPTUAL GLOSSARY

Aletheia

The concept of truth as unveiling. Truth appears in a partial, situated, and never definitive way.

Active front

Negation of the hierarchy between front and back. Every side of the work is a plane of meaning.

Field of immanence

A space where there is no separation between matter, spirit, image, and experience.

Layers and stratification

Construction of the work from material and perceptual sediments that are revealed over time.

Unveiling

Process by which something latent becomes visible without being exhausted in its appearance.

Presence status

A procedural presence, living and active, not monumental or fixed.

Perceptual event

The work understood as an event that occurs in the experience of the spectator.

Phosphorus

Activatable matter that allows the revelation of latent layers under black light.

Friction

Productive resistance that prevents a closed reading and keeps the work in tension.

Non-representational image

An image that does not illustrate or replace the world, but rather activates it perceptually.

Immanence

Condition in which everything happens on the same ontological plane, without external transcendence.

Maze

Visual structure without a center or single resolution, open to multiple paths.

White light and black light

Conditions of appearance that modify perception without materially altering the work.

Open work

Work not closed, always available for new activations.

Sedimentation process

Visible accumulation of decisions, journeys, and material transformations.

Putting the truth into practice

Truth understood as something that happens in the work and not as a message.

Progressive revelation

Gradual unfolding of meaning that is never offered immediately or completely.

Time of the work

A temporal dimension that demands slowing down and sustained attention.

Transmutation

Transition from one state to another without definitive fixation. Ethics of becoming.

Will to process

Internal drive that keeps the work in constant transformation.

AVAILABLE WORKS

WORK RECORD

Registro 1
Registro 2 Registro 3

FURTHER READING

  • The origin of the artwork.
    Martin Heidegger. In Forest Paths. Madrid: Alianza.
    (Foundational text of the concept of “putting truth into practice” and of truth as aletheia.)
  • Phenomenology of perception.
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Paris: Gallimard.
    (Key to understanding the work as a bodily and perceptual experience.)
  • The open work.
    Umberto Eco. Milan: Bompiani.
    (The work as an open-ended structure, activated by the viewer.)
  • The relevance of beauty today.
    Hans-Georg Gadamer. Barcelona: Paidós.
    (The aesthetic experience as an event and a game of appearance.)
  • To see and not to see.
    John Berger. London: Penguin Books.
    (The gaze as a cultural construct and a conscious act.)
  • The time-image.
    Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Minuit.
    (Think about the image from the perspective of time, becoming, and mutation.)
  • The space of thought.
    Gianni Vattimo. Madrid: Chair.
    (Art, truth, and the weakening of strong structures.)
  • Against the method.
    Paul Feyerabend. Mexico City: Sexto Piso.
    (Critique of closed systems and defense of the plurality of modes of knowledge.)
  • Art and visual perception.
    Rudolf Arnheim. Berkeley: University of California Press.
    (Perceptual structures, form, tension, and visual organization.)