Iruka Maria Toro
born 1983, Puerto Rico
LaCa Projects proudly presents a new collection of paintings by New York-based artist Cristina Toro. Her vibrant canvases are deeply rooted in her enchanted childhood in Puerto Rico. Her life there was filled with a menagerie of exotic pets and trips with her parents to the island’s rain forests and El Morro Castle, a picturesque 16th-century fort on the San Juan coast. When Toro was ten years old, her family moved to Florida where she would spend the remainder of her youth exploring the humid, swampy landscape.
The exhibition title Casa en el Cielo (House in the Sky) is a lyric from the song ‘Tiempo y Silencio/Time and Silence’ by the Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora (1941-2010). Like the song, these paintings illustrate a mortal journey through time and space––a journey rife with discovery and loss, laughter and grief, love and longing. The radiant worlds conjured by Toro pulsate with exuberance and ravenous curiosity that sets their inhabitants soaring through the heavens and plunging into hallucinatory, underwater realms.