Where Water Is Born: Hugo Toro’s “Ojo de Agua” at Perrotin New York

At the center of the gallery, two chairs sit facing one another across a sea of some three thousand ceramic forms—close enough to suggest a conversation, too far apart to ever have one. One belonged to Hugo Toro‘s grandmother in Oaxaca; the other to his French grandparents in Eastern France. Neither has been rendered, photographed, or reimagined. Both are simply, insistently, present: silent witnesses to two family histories that never fully met, yet go on coexisting inside the artist who inherited them.

This is the emotional architecture of Hugo Toro’s “Ojo de Agua,” his first exhibition in the United States and his debut with Perrotin. Borrowing its name from his maternal grandparents’ village in Oaxaca—the place where water is born—the show gathers more than a dozen paintings and sculptures in which water arrives in melancholic reds, greens, and blacks rather than the blue we expect. Across these canvases, the Franco-Mexican artist paints a country he has never lived in, navigating the distance between what he was given and what he imagined.

Why Hugo Toro Chose New York for His First U.S. Exhibition

WHITEWALL: “Ojo de Agua” is your first exhibition in the United States, and your first with Perrotin. You might have made this introduction in Paris, where you live, or in Mexico, where the work keeps returning. Why New York?

HUGO TORO: New York felt like the right place for this exhibition precisely because it sits outside the two geographies that have shaped it. I could have presented this work in France, where I was born and where I live, or in Mexico, which has long inhabited my imagination. Instead, I was drawn to a third territory.

New York is a city surrounded by water, and water lies at the heart of this exhibition. But it is also a city shaped by arrivals. For generations, people have crossed oceans carrying memories, languages, recipes, family stories, and fragments of distant worlds. In many ways, New York is a city built from inherited narratives.

That felt deeply connected to “Ojo de Agua.” The exhibition is not really about France or Mexico. It is about the space between them. It is about what remains in motion between one shore and another. Showing the work here allowed these questions of origin, displacement, and belonging to unfold in a place where identities are constantly being reshaped. There is something beautiful to me about presenting a body of work born from movement in a city that has always been defined by it.

Painting a Mexico He Has Never Lived In

WW: You were born in Sarreguemines and have never lived in Mexico, and yet it is the territory your painting returns to most insistently. What is it to paint a country you hold only through your mother’s memory?

HT: I never lived in Mexico, but Mexico lived around me.

It was present in my mother’s stories, in family gatherings, in food, in photographs, in the names of places that sounded almost mythical when I was a child. Long before I ever encountered the country itself, I encountered its narratives.

“The exhibition is not really about France or Mexico. It is about the space between them.”

Hugo Toro

The Mexico that appears in my paintings is not a geographical place. It is an emotional landscape assembled from memories that are not entirely mine. A territory built from transmission. The paintings emerge from that distance. They attempt to navigate the space between what I inherited and what I imagined, between family history and personal mythology.

“Ojo de Agua”: From Oaxacan Village to a Way of Seeing

WW: The exhibition borrows its name from Ojo de Agua, your maternal grandparents’ village in Oaxaca — in Spanish, the place where water is born. At what point did a place name become a way of seeing?

HT: For a long time, Ojo de Agua was simply a place that existed in stories. A name I heard before I ever understood its geography.

As I grew older, it became something else. Not a destination, but a lens. A way of understanding how memories travel across generations.

The meaning of the name itself—the place where water emerges from the earth—resonated deeply with me. Water became a metaphor for everything that interested me: movement, transmission, transformation, memory. Eventually, Ojo de Agua stopped referring to a specific village and became a way of looking at the world. A way of understanding how identities are formed through what flows between generations rather than what remains fixed.

What the Architect Brings to the Canvas

WW: You came to painting through architecture and interior design, and you’ve described that passage as a continuation rather than a break. What does the architect still bring to the canvas?

HT: People often assume there is a direct relationship between my architecture and my paintings, but for me they come from very different places.

Architecture belongs to the exterior world. It is collaborative, inhabited, functional. Painting is where I retreat into something much more private.

If there is a connection, it is not formal. It is perhaps a shared sensitivity to atmosphere, rhythm, and composition. But painting allows me to access questions that architecture cannot. It is a place where intuition matters more than function, where memories can take shape without needing justification. In many ways, painting feels closer to dreaming than building.

Pigmentogenesis: Why Hugo Toro’s Water Is Never Blue

WW: In his text for the show, Guillaume Kientz observes that your water is never simply blue—that it carries red, yellow, green. There is a refusal in that. What does it free you to do, and how does it sit within what you call your pigmentogenèse?

HT: I am less interested in describing what water looks like than in exploring what it carries. Water absorbs memories, reflections, histories, emotions. Why should it remain blue?

Color is often where a painting begins for me. Before there is a landscape, a figure, or a narrative, there is pigment. What I call pigmentogenesis is this moment when color itself becomes generative. A red river can hold longing. A green river can hold memory. A black river can hold mourning.

“Water absorbs memories, reflections, histories, emotions.”

Hugo Toro

The color is never illustrating the subject. It is creating its emotional reality.

Two Chairs, a Sea of Ceramics in Hugo Toro’s “Ojo de Agua”

WW: At the center of the exhibition you’ve set two actual chairs—one from your grandmother’s house in Oaxaca, the other from your French grandparents’—facing one another, not quite touching, encircled by some three thousand ceramic forms. Why bring the real objects in, rather than their images?

HT: Because memory often survives through objects. One chair comes from my grandmother’s house in Oaxaca. The other belonged to my French grandparents. They have absorbed years of conversations, silences, gestures, absences. They carry traces of lives.

I wasn’t interested in representing them. I wanted them to be present.

Placed face to face, they become something almost like two distant shores. Between them unfolds a sea of ceramics. A space of transmission. A conversation between two family histories that never fully met, yet somehow continue to coexist within me.

WW: The chairs recur across the paintings as a kind of presence—witnesses, you’ve suggested. What do they hold that a figure would not?

HT: A chair speaks through absence. A figure tells you who is there. A chair reminds you who has left. For me, these chairs are silent witnesses. They hold memories without describing them. They invite projection. They allow the viewer to inhabit the space. In that sense, they become less like objects and more like vessels for memory.

What Painting Holds That Words Cannot

WW: You’ve said that when language fails to hold the experience of belonging to several histories at once, painting finds its own. What does paint articulate that words cannot?

HT: Painting allows contradictions to coexist. It allows memories, emotions, and temporalities to occupy the same space without needing resolution. Words often seek clarity. Painting accepts uncertainty.

For someone whose identity has been shaped by inherited stories, multiple cultures, and imagined geographies, that ambiguity feels closer to truth than any precise definition ever could.