Galleria Franco Noero is proud to present When Time Lost Its Patience, Mario García Torres's first solo exhibition in Turin in the space of Via Mottalciata, which changes configuration to accommodate a number of unpublished works - sculptures, paintings, photographs and a book - to which the artist include a 2013 video and a work that dates back to the beginning of his career.

'What does it mean to delay, suspend or even abandon a project? What is the origin of the artist's hesitation? Taking a break, refusing progress and its rhetoric, do they not deserve a reflection?'. These are some of the questions García Torres puts in the prologue of the book "Una promessa non mantenuta (A promise not fulfilled)", the publication that accompanies the exhibition and at the same time constitutes a fundamental part of it, to the point of being considered by the artist as a real work of art. Starting from an apparently unfinished painting of British artist David Hockney, Untitled (Red Square), 1964 - a red square with inscribed at the bottom the words "My Dear Jim + Jack, - I'll come back and finish the picture later. This is just a background color. Love David XX" - the Mexican artist brings to light the past episode and today asks to six Italian writers - Gabriele di Fronzo, Matteo Nucci, Emiliano Poddi & Elena Sottili, Enrico Remmert, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Andrea Tarabbia - to imagine the backstory of Hockney's sentence, a story of their invention with the only condition of ending always with the same sentence by Hockney. In fact, we do not know what prompted Hockney to never end the picture, nor why he has included this painting among his completed works.

Reflection on the concepts of non-finished, incomplete or unfinished is the fil rouge that binds all the works on display, starting from 'La esposicion de Mario Garcia Torres ha sido pospuesta' (The exhibition by Mario Garcia Torres has been postponed), one of the artist's first works announcing exactly what the the title says through the assembly language (ASM) used in digital programming, to conclude with the monologue video defending the idea of hesitation as a political statement against progress, realized by García Torres on the occasion of a collective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2013.

The works specifically made for this exhibition express the same concepts: six sequential photographs, such as an inverted Fibonacci, portray the room of the Cinema Massimo in Turin that progressively empties during the eight-hour cinematographic marathon organized in September by the artist himself as a prologue of this show, recording the abandonment of the public film after film. On the gallery walls, a series of large canvases of the same format have different shades and grain and are all very lean with matter as they were prepared to receive the colors of the brushstrokes. This is in fact true since each of them has been made following some of the recipes written by Giorgio De Chirico for the preparation of the canvases, while their format faithfully reproduces the size of the canvas placed on a tripod in De Chirico's home-studio in Rome, probably the last canvas that the master would have worked on.

The series entitled Lost Act consists of fifteen bronze sculptures apparently placed on the floor in a sequence given by chance, as if someone would blow on small pieces of wrapped paper. Once again, the idea of something that is not completely determined and, in fact, the Lost Acts are the result of the artist's quick gestures on the original packaging carton structure by modelling then the shape of the metal sculpture, while at the same time become the mean to question a term used by Mexican artists in the 1960s to define the act of plastic creation, 'plastic act', referring more to a public theatrical mise-en-scene than to a private artistic gesture. Garcia Torres collects the legacy and novelty of avant-garde movements since the 1960s in terms of installation, attitude and use of materials, including Arte Povera and its new explorations.

Through his new works, the Mexican artist investigates the mechanisms of production of artistic thought and explores the dark, unofficial and non-historical points of conceptual art, his figures, and practices, dwelling on his most immaterial legacy connected to news, rumors and live testimony, and in this case also decides to use various media such as video, sculpture, painting, photography and writing to broaden the experience of direct fruition of the exhibited works, whether material or immaterial, that passes on the involvement of third parties or the public itself within his own work.

When Time Lost Its Patience is an attempt to move the moment of creation and perception, trying to break time and wonder if it is really desirable to set fulfilment as an objective continuing to perceive artworks as finished objects rather than as mediators of a process that has happened before and will continue to be implemented later on.

Mario García Torres (1975, Monclova, Messico) is a conceptual artist that lives and works in Mexico. He participated to important international exhibitions such as Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah, UAE (2017); Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); São Paulo Bienal, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2010); La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2007). His work has been object of several solo exhibitions in Institutions such as Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016); Perez Art Museum, Miami (2015); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Museo MADRE, Napoli (2013); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009), Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2008); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007). Among his group exhibitions - Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2011) – and his work is present in the collections of some of the most important international museums such as Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum. In 2018-19 García Torres is planning an important solo project at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, USA and WIELS – Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brussels.