Portfolio 2006
Richard Torchia • Study for Funes the Memorious (cloud contours traced in a camera obscura between 4:30p.m. and 5p.m., July 9, 2006, Baltimore, Maryland)
15" x 18" • Etching
C. Royce Ettinger Studio
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Bio
Richard Torchia earned a BA from College of the Holy Cross, MA. He has exhibited at The Print Center, Morris Arboretum, Eastern State Penitentiary, Tyler School of Art of Temple University, Schmidt/Dean Gallery, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He has been included in group shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, Sligo Art Gallery in Ireland, Manciano in Italy, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, Norwich School of Art and Design in England, A.R.C. Gallery in Chicago, Port of Copenhagen in Denmark, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in Philadelphia. Torchia was awarded fellowships by Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Pew. His works is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Prudential Life Insurance Company, National Postal Archives in Nova Scotia, the Franklin Furnace Archives, and Museum of Modern Art in New York.
About the print
In Study for Funes the Memorious (cloud contours traced in a camera obscura between 4:30p.m. and 5p.m., July 9, 2006, Baltimore, Maryland), artist Richard Torchia references the short story Funes the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges in which a young man isolates himself in a dark room as a way to cope with the condition of an extreme photographic memory that will not allow him to forget anything. The following is a sentence from the story (translated by James E. Irby) as it appears in Labyrinths (1962): "He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising."