Interview
Jose Antonio Torres
Jose Antonio Torres is an innovative artist who pioneered a unique process to transform tunes and melodies into visual masterpieces through his project Sound Art (“Arte Sonoro”) and ArtSonify.com His work delves into the intricate exploration of song frequencies and sound waves, unearthing the profound relationship between shape and hue, while probing the unseen emotional resonance and the perceptible aspects of the imperceptible nature of sound.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“My path has been forged from a blend of obsession, memory, and extraordinary circumstances. I've created art from the depths of my being, always striving to give intrinsic value to the message, to ensure coherence between what I want to say and how I express it in my work. I've developed intimate, exploratory, surreal, playful, dreamlike, dark, and vividly colorful projects. Music was always my first love, like an invisible architecture shaping my thoughts, and at some point, the visual became inevitable. I don't recall a precise moment when I ‘decided’ to be an artist. It was more of a natural drift, an instinct that took hold with the urgency of someone needing to document their existence to understand it. My early years were a period of voracious experimentation: painting, installation, video art, screenwriting, dreamlike universes - all in search of my own language. The ‘Bahía Bogotá’ series marked a turning point. I was in a phase of personal and artistic reconstruction after losing a decade's worth of records in a studio theft. That's when I understood that memory is a battlefield, and my work would revolve around that struggle.”
What inspires you?
“Color, emotion, form. And sound too. Not as a reference, but as a deep structure that shapes how I perceive the world. I'm fascinated by how frequencies can affect the body. Also, nostalgia, not in a melancholic sense, but as a process of personal archaeology. I explore how certain memories become fixed, how they fade, how a song can contain the complete architecture of a city that no longer exists. On a formal level, I'm interested in the physicality of materials, how a vibration can be translated into an image, how error or accident can be the starting point of a work. I work a lot with the idea of resonance, both literally and metaphorically.”
What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?
“I work with memory, sound, and emotion as central themes. I'm interested in how music can be translated into the visual without losing its emotional charge. ‘Painting Music’ arose from that curiosity: identifying the most emotional moments of a song, translating them into frequencies, making their vibrations visible, and tracing their patterns in space. More than a closed message, my work poses questions. How is an emotion translated into form? How does a song become a map of time and memory? To what extent is what we remember real? There's an element of exploration and, at the same time, a kind of resistance against the uniformity of digital imagery.”
How would you describe your work?
“It's the intersection of sound, memory, and matter. It's not about illustrating music, but capturing its visual DNA. Each piece is the result of a process involving spectrometry, cymatics, and pictorial experimentation. Aesthetically, there's a constant tension between control and chaos. I work with washes, with forms that emerge from error, with strokes that seem like fragments of a coded score. If I had to sum it up in a phrase, I'd say it's an attempt to make the intangible visible.”
Which artists influence you most?
“I don't look for direct references, but I admire artists who have challenged the relationship between sound and image. Kandinsky, for his synesthetic vision. Ryoji Ikeda, for his mathematical precision. Bill Viola, for his exploration of memory and time. I also find echoes in the tradition of kinetic art and contemporary sound art. Beyond visual art, my influence comes from music. The work of Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, or Brian Eno has been more influential in my process than that of many painters. Also, literature, especially authors who work with fragmentation and non-linearity, like Cortázar or Sebald.”
“I work with memory, sound, and emotion as central themes. I'm interested in how music can be translated into the visual without losing its emotional charge.”
What is your creative process like?
“It oscillates between structure and chance. First, I identify a song, a fragment, a specific vibration that I want to explore. Then I go through a technical process where I convert the sound into a visual representation using spectrometry and cymatics. From there, the pictorial process takes over, with a combination of washes, manual strokes, and digital interventions. The observation of the blank canvas is key. I can spend hours watching how the paint settles, how certain forms emerge without intervention. It's a dialogue between the planned and the spontaneous. There's also an almost obsessive part to my work. If an idea haunts me, I explore it to the extreme. I can spend days isolated, repeating the same process until I find the exact variation I'm looking for.”
What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?
“The artist is a translator of the invisible. I don't believe in art as an ornamental or entertainment function. Its role is to open questions, to challenge when necessary, to create an echo in the observer. Today, we live in an era of disposable images, where everything is reduced to fast-consumption content. Art must resist that speed, it must be a space for pause and depth. In the future, I see the artist increasingly involved in the intersection of art, science, and technology, exploring new forms of perception and sensory experience. My work falls within that territory: it doesn't seek to provide easy answers, but to generate experiences that transform the way we perceive music, memory, and time.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“I recently had an exhibition, JUSTMAD 2025 in Madrid at the International Contemporary Art Fair.”
