De la Torre Brothers Are Making the Most of Maximalism

The wallpapered-room is filled with antiques and a menagerie of blinged-out taxidermy. A 24-foot-long banquet table has been laid out, but the dinner guests seem to have disappeared, leaving their coats behind. On the table: nucleated eyeballs nestling in golden spoons, miniature torsos propped up on cake stands, and baby Kewpie dolls trapped in red goo, like candied desserts. A glass “Capitalist Pig,” one of several profane centerpieces, grins as it defecates gold coins.

The banquet, an installation called “Le Point de Bascule” (“The Tipping Point”) at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, is visually stunning, and also a bit repulsive — and that’s the point. “We’re repulsed by this opulence,” said one of its creators, Einar de la Torre. “But we’re also thinking: ‘God, I wish I’d been invited to this party.’”

The brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre create mixed-media works of dazzling complexity. Using disparate materials, including blown glass, mass-produced curios, resin castings and photocollage, the siblings, who have collaborated artistically since the 1990s, construct richly detailed, mandala-like installations; lenticular prints that shimmy and explode with movement; and color-saturated glass sculptures embedded with workaday items like dominoes, coins or doll parts.

Pre-Columbian deities, Mexican lucha libre wrestlers, Olmec heads, Slavic water spirits — the de la Torres’ visual universe is vast and pantheistic. The brothers freely mix high and low, in part, they say, to challenge entrenched ideas about beauty and “good taste.”

“In college, there was a lot of minimalism,” Einar, the younger of the siblings, recalled at a recent interview at their studio in Baja California, Mexico. “We thought: how the hell are we ever going to make it in the art world, which wants to distill everything down to the bare bones? We’re kind of the opposite. We wanted to add more meaning.”