Carlos Marcial Torres: Life In 3D
How an Artist’s Renaissance Talents Culminated Into Magical Realism
Creative Depth
Carlos Marcial Torres was exposed to the arts at a very early age. His father was a painter and an art professor. His mother — an art historian, art critic, writer and university professor. He recalls himself as a child, exploring his father’s art studio and excitedly checking out the pretty pictures in his mother’s art history books.
His parents’ friends were also artists who practiced a variety of art disciplines, including literature, music, film, and theatre. This is what inspired him to explore his creative impulses since he was a teenager — a time when he started drawing, writing, and playing musical instruments.
School Outside of School
Although Marcial Torres studied film directing and script writing at the Drama Centre London, as well as film and literature at the University of Puerto Rico — all of the technical knowledge he had about 3D modeling, animation and rendering, he learned on YouTube. “You don’t need to go to college or university to have a successful career as a 3D digital artist.”
You don’t need to go to college or university to have a successful career as a 3D digital artist.
Marcial Torres was born in Mexico City, but after both his parents finished their studies in Mexico, they all moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. He lived in the capital city of Puerto Rico for the rest of his formative years. He worked for several years at the local Puerto Rico TV and Film industry as an editor, VFX artist and comp artist. It was during these years that he started to get deeper into 3D rendering to compliment both the kind of editing work he was doing for his clients, as well as everything he was doing film-wise.
After graduating from the Drama Centre London, he eventually returned to his place of birth, Mexico, where he currently works and lives with his wife and kids. Mexico continues to be a learning experience for Torres. It opened up his eyes to different ways of seeing art and culture — from the ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures, art and architecture up to 20th century avant-garde artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Mexico’s way of living and breathing, its art and culture, has helped him to mature as an artist.
It’s A Magical Process
Marcial Torres — one of the first digital artists in art’s history to live completely off crypto and crypto art — describes his style to be 3D realism with a leaning towards the Latin American art movement called Magical Realism, where the real becomes inexorably linked to the supernatural world of everyday people’s beliefs.
The realism comes from his obsessive search for finding new and better ways to achieve photo-realism with his 3D renders, but without losing sight of all the whimsical, surrealist and fantastical things that can be achieved thanks to 3D technology.
Upon receiving inspiration, Marcial Torres finds all the 3D resources to achieve his vision, and gathers the assets inside his 3D software where he can then start to compose a 3D scene. After blocking the scene and creating simple animations to get a feel for what the final product could be, he usually moves to texturing and lighting, which he enjoys the most. The final step is creating meticulously perfect looping animations — otherwise, he won’t tokenize it.
A New Original Artwork: The Blockchain is the Message
The Blockchain is the Message is Marcial Torres’ first tokenized animated MP4 video loop, specifically inside his “crypto oeuvre”. In his search to best visually communicate the idea of the blockchain, he ended up experimenting with the animated succession of connected rooms as a metaphor for the blocks that make up any blockchain. It is a culmination of his aesthetic research into the creation of these “perfect” looping blocks of architecture. This can be seen specially in the use of photo-real textures applied to the 3D models that make up the sequence. It is because of this search for a cinematic mood that this sequence is the first “Infinity Room” to be rendered in full HD video (1280 x 1920). It exemplifies how a great looking loop should look (HD) and feel (infinite) especially when run on a good monitor, on an infinite loop.
“The Blockchain is the Message” is the aesthetic and technical summation of his successful Infinity Rooms series. He was able to use physically-based 4K textures on all of the room’s 3D geometry, with the room’s walls and floors transporting him back to the streets of Puerto Rico or Mexico.
The rooms are connected as blocks on a blockchain, for all eternity. This is Marcial Torres’ way of exploring how to visually represent blockchain tech — something he infinitely obsesses over. Uniquely, the camera passes through the TV set (rather than a door). Marcial Torres invites you the viewer to pass through media, while simultaneously inviting your eye to conceptually go through a blockchain.
Come and take a step inside — again, and again, and again …
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Top Selling Pieces
Accomplishments
2020 — “A message worth repeating” collaboration with Lucho Poletti,
Citadel 6.15 Art Experience, Cryptovoxels
