Fharid LaTorre (b. 1999, Miami, FL) is a contemporary artist based in Miami, working primarily in sculpture. His work is currently on view in a two person exhibition, Evidence of Evolution, at QUEUE Gallery alongside Jamieson Pearl.
LaTorre received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2022 and works primarily in sculpture. His practice explores the beginning point of fracturing, where rupture, healing, and regeneration coexist, examining moments of capture and the (non) consensual illusions that stabilize them. Through materially driven forms informed by medical and industrial systems, his work evokes altered anatomical responses and mutations outside individual control, shaped by infrastructures of extraction and circulation that interpenetrate human life at both massive and molecular scales. LaTorre is currently in residence at Tunnel Projects and YoungArts.
300 SW 12th Ave, Unit 324-A, Miami, FL
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CC: Your sculptures often involve combined elements of hand-carved wood and various kinds of metals. Can you describe the circumstances that led you instinctively to these materials? Where do you source them?
FL: I’m drawn to materials that already have a life before I get to them. materials shaped by a previous industry or context carries that history in its body and that means it’s not just my eye making the piece. The material is already making decisions. I’m collaging with other languages, other logics, and that friction is generative. It makes the work harder to fully possess which is exactly what I want.
Each material arrives with its own aura and associations, its own baggage and a completely different relationship to time and to my hand. Honestly the material is doing a lot of that selecting itself. For example, wood burl specifically is unique because it is a tree that panicked. It’s experienced prolonged duress over decades, producing these completely irrational dense growths with no logic, no direction, no architectural intention whatsoever. Just a living thing turning inward and generating something ungovernable. Everything about it is just barely there. The tiniest impact reads.
Fharid LaTorre, showing slivers & taking off skin for sake of dopamine layer of diophantine equations, 2026
I'm drawn to steel because it remembers its previous life. Ladder jacks. Sintered armatures. Modular objects designed for a specific function and that function is not hidden. It's still legible, still present in the form. I’m interested in objects that are manifestations of the desire to quantify, to contain, to fix something in place. And that desire has consequences. When you apply that logic to a self or to a history, the result is that certain traditions, histories, and beliefs become perceivable only through the framework that desire has already built—predetermined lenses that can’t see outside their own architecture.The self resists quantification but these structures don’t acknowledge that resistance. They just keep performing their function. There’s something about a structure built to contain or support or suspend that we accept as fixed, as final, as authoritative. But that fixity is just an assumption.These objects are as malleable as anything else.That gap between the authority an object projects and what it can actually become is where I work.
I find the wood. The steel comes through clinical fabricators and industrial suppliers which I then further modify.
CC: You also have, quite impressively, taught yourself all that we’ve seen of the hand-carved wood in your pieces. Can you speak on the relevancy of being both the student and the teacher in your studio process? How often are you learning along the way when creating?
FL: My relationship to craft has changed over time but I am always learning. With the wood carving specifically all I had going in was observation, whether— watching artists I used to assist or demos from art school that I barely retained. That was it. I just picked up tools and started and the material itself told me when I was wrong. There was no teacher to check in with, no outside authority, just arguments with the wood until something gave. So the student and the teacher are the same person and they don't always agree. There's this constant negotiation happening and a lot of it is frustrating and a lot of it is liberating and I'll push past exhaustion just to get to the other side of a problem I've never faced before. That tendency is just embedded in how I work. I by no means know everything about making objects and I'm still very much inside all of it. But I've also started to notice that seeking a very high level of mastery can become its own trap, a way of finding comfort through the material, turning the whole thing into a task to complete rather than staying open to a process you're actually still learning. So I've been trying to stay honest about what needs my hands and what doesn't, and keeping myself in that uncomfortable place of not fully knowing because I think that's actually where the work lives.
CC: There is obvious physical tension seen in your work, from the way the materials interact to the way pieces have the adaptability to be installed and hung in ways that stray from the traditional sculpture on a pedestal. Can you tell us a bit about the conceptual tension that is also inherent in your work?
FL: I somewhat refrain from the premise of tension. The word implies two things pulling apart and I am not interested in the notion of separating . Matter does not separate. Matter just combines, endlessly, without asking permission, without consulting our taxonomies of natural and unnatural, organic and synthetic. Those categories are a story we’ve told ourselves to feel special, and the work is partly just my irritation with that story made physical.. Wood is technical. Steel is alive. The distinction was always a hallucination.
I keep returning to this question of surface. When you polish steel or wood, something synthetic happens to the outside while the interior stays completely indifferent to what you just did to its face. But at what level of resolution does something become true? Go deep enough into any material and the surface and the core are both just atomic configurations. The distinction dissolves. I think of this as a kind of PSYOP realism. Something can be true and false simultaneously depending on where you're standing when you look at it. We treat surfaces like a lie anyway, like something pinned on top of a body that would rather be naked. But that creates the assumption that there is a “naked”. Therefore assuming that something underneath the representation is more real than the representation itself. I think the finish and the core are running the same program at different frequencies and what we call authenticity is just the frequency we happen to be standing at.
What interests me is when the finish is not applied but extracted. Pulled from inside the material like a confession it didn't know it was making. Because then you can't locate the lie anymore. You can't point to where the real ends and the constructed begins. And I think that is also what the work asks of the person standing in front of it. It has to be familiar enough that you find your own body somewhere inside it. But then it also has to take you somewhere your body has never been and show you a room you did not know was yours. That is the coordinate I keep trying to find.
CC: You were born in Miami, but like many Miamians, you are a product of immigrant parents, with Peruvian and Persian heritage. Has your background influenced any aspects of your practice?
FL: The most honest answer is that I often hesitate around that framing. Not because my background is irrelevant but because I think the expectation that it should show up legibly in the work is its own kind of box. Like there's this assumption that heritage produces iconography and I'm not really interested in producing iconography.
What I will say is that growing up between cultures means you grow up understanding that categories are constructed. You are never fully one thing to anyone. You are always being read incorrectly by multiple groups simultaneously and at some point that stops being disorienting and starts being useful. It made me suspicious of fixed identities early. It made me suspicious of the idea that materials or bodies or people belong to fixed categories at all. And that suspicion is absolutely everywhere in the work even if you can't point to it and call it Peruvian or call it Persian. So I guess what I'm saying is the influence is real but it's structural. It's in the refusal to be legible. It's in the comfort of contradiction. It's in the understanding that matter, like people, does not belong to the categories we assign it.
CC: The titles of your pieces are often somewhat vulgar, referencing something that falls between self-harm and transformation. Do your titles act as vulnerable insights into the works at all? Please tell us a bit about how they are born.
FL: The titles aren't confessional but they're not arbitrary either. My work is deeply personal and psychological but I'm not trying to be biographically narrative about it. I think of words more like sculptural textures than explanations. Words placed next to each other produce a mood, a pressure, and that has to coincide with what the material is already doing. The process is also pretty removed from me literally. I write a lot about my work privately and from that writing I'll run text through multiple translations, language generators, until what's left is something incantatory. Something that's been processed enough that my fingerprints are gone but the residue of my original thought process is still there. The title becomes its own material at that point.
I do think context matters enormously for any artwork but I'm skeptical of writing that tries to inject meaning into work that should already contain it. If the work needs to be explained it hasn't done its job. Anything surrounding the work should function as a framing device not an instruction manual. Context gets constructed in so many ways and I'm interested in how that operates as a whole, not just through language. So the titles are part of that construction but they're not necessarily vulnerable insights. They're more like pressure applied from the outside that the work either confirms or resists.
CC: What are some influences outside of your practice that you look to or reflect on in your process? Are there any artists, texts, or music that inspire you at the moment?
FL: I make an effort to not look outside too much for influence. I find that turning inward and unpacking shadow work sorts out stubborn hiccups whether you like it or not. Right now I’m reading Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum which is filled with these humbling dirty laundry moments spread throughout constructions of social strata. It really embodies the embarrassing predicament of just being contained in this matter. It touches on the trifecta of animal, human, and psyche and sheds light on what actually constitutes a humbling moment. Some of the stories feel like just part of day to day life, which makes it destabilizing and entertaining at the same time. Seeing the full spectrum of both ego and shadow laid out like that. It’s good.
