ROYGBIV: Julio Torres’s Color Theories and the art of curatorial comedy
By Sophie Fox
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OVER THE PAST DECADE, Julio Torres has perfected the art of curatorial comedy, a term I’ve just coined. This is a highly sophisticated brand of object-oriented, narrativized humor whose deadpan subtlety makes it categorically distinct from the blunt physicality of straight-male-dominated prop comedy. Ultimately a mode of ekphrasis, Torres’s approach recalls a precocious child opening his toy box and playing an elaborate game of show-and-tell, and, at the same time, a grad school anthropology seminar on “Thing Theory.” In his lecture-performance Color Theories, which recently aired as an HBO comedy special, Torres explores the abstract qualities of color, channeling, as usual, his obsession with matters of aesthetic judgment in the cultural context of terminal capitalism. The result is something akin to John Berger’s 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing, a tour de force of visual literacy and Marxist critique—that is, if Berger were more like Pee-wee Herman mellowed out by a weed gummy.
Torres became a staff writer for Saturday Night Live in 2016. One of his early sketches featured an enormous glass vessel sink that, in the voice of Emily Blunt, laments its existence as a neo-Baroque statement piece: “I’m the answer to a question no one asked.” Another took the form of a Fisher-Price commercial hawking a “Sensitive Boy Line” of plastic wishing wells, plastic Juliet balconies, and plastic shattered mirrors, toys that offer mamas’ boys safe avenues for moments of reflection and confession: “Don’t just give him a Barbie,” the voice-over says. “I mean, it is like that, but that’s just part of it.” (Several years later, artist Alex Da Corte would meticulously reproduce the well, at adult scale.) In 2019, Torres debuted in his first HBO special, My Favorite Shapes, in which he used a pedal-operated conveyor belt to summon onstage a succession of objects (an anthropomorphic Chicken McNugget, a miniature cactus, a tiny neoclassical chair) whose elaborate backstories he plumbed with emotional nuance. Next, Torres published I Want to Be a Vase (2022), a children’s book about a humble plunger and other household appliances; illustrated in a pearlescent palette out of a Lisa Frank fever dream, it reads as a hallucinatory allegory of trans experience.
With Color Theories, Torres takes up a subject that Western philosophy has traditionally regarded as subordinate or extraneous to the objective properties of form. The main “objects” that offer a transition between the old work and the new are two stagehands, one dressed as a wine spill and the other as a music box, performing their labor like the enchanted candelabra or teapot in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Relegated to turning the canvas pages of a giant pop-up book that sits upright on its spine in the center of the stage, they gradually recede over the course of the performance. When Torres emerges at the top of the show, it’s through a hole in these pages—outlined in a squiggle, like a plaster victim from Pompeii curled up into a fetal position. (Torres also disappears through the hole at the end, when the pages are reimagined as the surface of a pond or the abyssal depths of the sea.) All of this, alongside pop-up furniture that unfolds and refolds back into the book like an elaborate origami puzzle, recalls Deleuze’s reading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, where sense emerges at the very surface of things, in the space between language and reality.
Torres spends most of Color Theories outlining, of course, his color theories, in the form of a lecture that feels like an art student LARPing as a TED Talk presenter, scribbling out geometric diagrams on the pop-up book’s pages in vivid oil pastel. “When I say that something is a color,” he instructs, “I don’t mean that literally.” Yellow, we learn, is childlike wonder: Ellen (DeGeneres, whose television show was cutely infantilized with a lower-case e) masquerades in the mind’s eye as yellow, hiding her true anger and rage (red). Orange combines the two: The Rock (Dwayne Johnson). Navy blue, naturally, is the color of law and order, German efficiency, passports, national security legislation (solid blue lines circumscribing red war crimes), and tax evasion (dotted blue lines allowing the red to come and go as it pleases). It is also the color of an online review of a waterfall on Google Maps and of the housewives of The Real Housewives (who contain their anger within a paper-thin envelope of decorum). Beige is millennials; beige is “delightfully inept”; beige is ceramics, “Pixar acting,” or those useless sculptural candles “that don’t stand erect and say, ‘I’m a candle,’ but are a series of blobs on top of each other” (in one of the best lines of the show, Torres impishly pouts: “I don’t know if I can candle today”). Purple is “when red gets to make fun of navy blue”; it’s all about seduction, secrets, and a hint of mischief (“Lilac is being a mom; purple is being a stepmother”). Purple is Barbra Streisand cloning her dog, Catholicism, attics, and surprise witnesses (I am reminded of a quote from Camille Paglia, who once expressed a very purple sentiment when discussing her love of Housewives and its soapy antecedents: “Gay men understand the burden of secrets and the ecstasy of the extreme gesture”). Torres is at his most Aristotelian when he talks about the “color” clear as a transparent medium facilitating sense-perception, or when, instead of identifying black and white with good and evil, he asserts that black (shadows, the space between people) is what we don’t know, while white (a doctor’s coat) is what we do.
Yellow, we learn, is childlike wonder: Ellen (DeGeneres, whose television show was cutely infantilized with a lower-case e) masquerades in the mind’s eye as yellow, hiding her true anger and rage (red).
Since comedy hinges on timing, it’s no accident that a key structural element of the show is found in Bibo—a cute, if testy, robot who urges Torres to hurry up and move on to the next color, attempting to keep careful track of time even though he lives inside a broken grandfather clock. Might this be a kind of queer protest against the social expectations of productivity under the regime of what theorist Elizabeth Freeman calls “chrononormativity”? What makes Torres’s comedy so contemporary is his way of effortlessly yoking a vernacular of aesthetic theory to the dystopian cadence of global supply chains. The inclusion of Bibo, this ineffectual robotic floor manager—as if the set were a topsy-turvy Amazon warehouse—captures what literary critics Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai have said about American comedy: that its sense of timing has “arguably saturated the Just in Time (JIT), logistics-enabled workplace in particular, organizing and informing the informal affective cultures that lubricate production, circulation, and consumption.” Elsewhere Ngai has defined the “zany” as a contemporary aesthetic category whose real subject is work—a particular kind of work that is post-Fordist, stressed-out, nonstop. Torres, aided by the haplessly underperforming Bibo, seems interested in slowness as a productive resistance to this ceaseless action; his performance, despite its gimmicks, is fundamentally clear-eyed, un-zany.
If I have a quibble with Color Theories, it’s the didacticism of the show’s ending, which effectively undersells or even threatens to negate everything that came before. Bibo, popping out of the clock like a cuckoo bird, frantically informs Torres that time is almost up. The robot then displays a PowerPoint-ish slide with a bar graph indicating the inordinate amount of time that Torres has devoted to navy blue in the show. A skirmish erupts between the two, with Bibo accusing Torres of being blind to his own biases and inadvertently creating a system that is itself navy blue (i.e., authoritarian). Torres denies this, asserting, “I am obviously creating a rubric for young people to be able to see the world using colors as a classification system to make sense of people and behaviors and systems in a way that we can all agree on.” The two then share a tender moment when Bibo suggests that we mix facts and feelings because “every classification we make is informed by our experiences” (I would add to Bibo’s claim and say that, in recursive fashion, classification shapes and frames what counts as experience). Torres is persuaded to rethink his model and scraps the subtitle of the show, changing it from “A Guide to Seeing the World” to “An Invitation to See,” likening himself to a deep-sea anglerfish that can only see what’s in front of it, inviting others to share what they see in turn. If this conversation is an attempt to reframe the show—to pitch it as a plea for finding common ground in a polarized, fragmented era—it seems totally redundant: Torres isn’t so much creating a rubric in Color Theories as formulating a Montessori-style curriculum, a choose-your-own-adventure menu of options from which to intuit and satisfy your curiosity.
The fact is that aesthetic judgments will always seem navy blue on the surface, because they by definition make claims to universality. But that’s not the same as building “systems in a way that we can all agree on.” Instead, the kinds of claims to universality that Torres is making rely on discourses of justification that, as Ngai reminds us, “demand concurrence” even as they confront “the dialogism and matrix of social conflict underlying all judgments of taste.” I’ll grant that “demanding concurrence” sounds a lot like navy blue behavior, but I would still maintain that aesthetic judgments, precisely because they do not establish laws by fiat but engage us rhetorically in a socially contested arena, are already invitations to participate in activities of worldmaking. In this sense, Torres’s closest intellectual interlocutor might be Wittgenstein, who argued that color is organized grammatically, rather than empirically—but that the rules of this grammar are constantly being recoded in language-games that never align with idealized systems of meaning-making. As art historian Darby English lucidly puts it, “To understand the grammar of our everyday color concepts is to see how grammar continually affords freedom from law or convention.” And there’s nothing navy blue about that.
Patrick R. Crowley is the Associate Curator of European Art at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, and the author of The Phantom Image: Seeing the Dead in Ancient Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
A version of this article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Artforum under the title “ROYGBIV.”
This article was originally published by Artforum.