Dani Torrent is shortlisted for his project Intimacy in the WIA2021 Professional Exploration Category! Find out more about his shortlisted project and practice:

What’s your favourite thing about your shortlisted project?

What interested me of this project was to represent the complexity of male intimacy, the limits between friendship and sensuality are much more clear than between women, which relationships are more fluid. Men do not touch each other but with the alibi of a sports or party context. And it’s those moments where relationships become fluid that interested me.

My illustration, through a simple composition and basic means, attempts to present a synthesis between apparently irreconcilable opposites: competitiveness and desire, attraction and rejection, strength and vulnerability, rivalry and love.

What materials did you use?

This image is the result of a process carried out during the quarantine in which in my sketchbook I was refining the use of pencils, tempera and waxes until I reached the most basic: colored pencils on paper. Then with Photoshop I finished adjusting the levels.

Why did you choose to enter this work?

This project, in addition to being a personal work, reflects the creative moment that these months of pandemic have brought with it. For the first time in years I was able to draw for myself. The world seemed to stop and my only client was myself. I went through the confinement alone, and that led me to reflect that lack of human contact on a notepad.

The drawings at the beginning were merely impulse drawings, clearly sexual, and with no other intention than immediacy. But little by little the intention was moving to formal exploration, to a liberation of form and color, and conceptual, on the complexity of human relationships.

What are your plans for the future?

My immediate projects are to illustrate a book of poetry by catalan author Carles Riba, to do the illustrations for an illustrated album with a beautiful text for an Italian publisher and also to publish a book with text and illustrations by me on which I have been working for a long time. At the same time, I am moving this exploration of male intimacy, to larger formats and other techniques such as acrylic and oil.

What’s your favourite thing to draw?

What I like to draw the most is the human body, its movement, tension and weight, its character and the way it moves, and the relationships that are created between characters.