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Artist to Watch: Hugo Toro Explores Origin, Belonging, and Identity in Emotionally-Charged Paintings

This summer, the French-Mexican talent Hugo Toro is debuting in his first US solo art exhibition at Perrotin New York

By Gay Gassmann
Hugo Toro in his Paris studio with My Grandfather Seated (2025).
Hugo Toro in his Paris studio with My Grandfather Seated (2025). Photo: ALEXANDRE TABASTE

Fluidly moving between the worlds of art, architecture, and interior design is completely natural for French Mexican artist Hugo Toro. “I’m interested in sensations that come before explanation, when color or form appears almost instinctively,” says the creative, who has conjured both residential and hospitality spaces rich in detail and nuance, including the Il Grande restaurant at Hôtel Palm Beach in Cannes, France, and the Orient Express La Minerva hotel in Rome. “Across all mediums, I’m essentially exploring storytelling, rebuilding fragments of memory and emotional narratives.”

Toro at work in his Paris studio.
Toro at work in his Paris studio. Photo: ALEXANDRE TABASTE
Inside Toro’s Paris studio.
Inside Toro’s Paris studio. Photo: ALEXANDRE TABASTE

This summer, Toro mounts his first solo art exhibition Stateside, at Perrotin New York, showcasing more than a dozen paintings and sculptures. “Drawing has always been my most intuitive language. I tend to think visually before I think verbally,”
says Toro, who first unveiled a small assortment of the works featured in the show last year at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Paris. Most of the pieces, however, have never been seen.

To the multi-hyphenate talent, painting is immediate, physical, and highly personal, reflecting his emotions almost like a mirror. His feelings pour out onto the canvas in ways, he says, he can’t always articulate until after a work is finished. “My visual style developed quite naturally over time,” he explains. “I rarely begin with a fixed concept; I usually start from an emotional impulse and see where it leads.”

Artist standing in a studio with paint-splattered pants, surrounded by canvases and art supplies.
Art studio with a large canvas painting of a figure, surrounded by scattered tools and paint on the floor.

Themes of origin, belonging, and identity populate his art. Water, too, is a frequent subject. “It connects elements while also distorting them, which makes it a natural metaphor for memory—fluid, unstable but continuous,” says Toro.

Color also steers his creative process, which starts in abstraction before gradually moving toward figuration. “I try to let the painting guide me rather than controlling it too early,” says Toro, who is increasingly drawn to large-scale canvases that allow him to experiment more freely with color, gesture, and a sense of unpredictability. “I’m less interested in deciding what a painting will be than discovering what it can become.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Summer Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.