Aboriginal Art by Australian Aboriginal Artists, Quality Aboriginal Paintings for sale.  

He is equally at home in a Paris art gallery as hunting the desert. Meet one of the world’s leading Aboriginal art dealers: Fred Torres

Fred Torres is a man of worlds. Rarely in one place more than a week at a time.
He is equally at home negotiating deals with art galleries in Paris and New York as he is hunting in the wild and painting with family members in his homeland of Utopia, in Northern Territory. But there is one factor that is common to all of his worlds: art.

"I feel most at home when I am among all this artwork," he says, gesturing around the  showroom of his DACOU Aboriginal Gallery which doubles as a living room for Torres, 39. and his family: partner Justine Barratt and daughters Mia, 4, Maria, 9, and Jade, 13.
"And when I go back to the desert, that’s where I actually get to chill and forget about everything, forget what day it is and what time It is and not worry about anything."

In contrast, in his city life, Torres pulls out his mobile phone during a conversation at an art gallery opening and is able to tell me time it is in New York City. His art world is a big one. As the director of DACOU (Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia), Torres represents some of Australia's most prominent and respected indigenous artists. To say art is in his blood is no cliché, as he counts among his family some of the stars of the Aboriginal art world.
His mother is Barbara Weir, Minnie Pwerle is his grandmother, Emily Kame Kngwarreye a great aunt and Gloria and Kathleen Petyarre his aunts. These family connections are what fired Fred's initial interest in art. In the late '8os, his mother and a few other women were painting in Alice Springs for 'pocket money' and Torres started painting with them.
He was living in Adelaide at the time, working as a plumber's apprentice. "When I came back to Adelaide, the family was always coming to visit me and they started doing paintings here in the backyard. I took those paintings to galleries around Adelaide and it just took off from there." Now DACOU has about 2000 paintings in Adelaide, and a similar amount placed with other galleries throughout Australia, as well as around the world.
Although you can expect to pay as much as 1.3m for a large work by Emily Kame Kngwarrreye, Torres does stock small works that are priced from $50. The gallery is situated in an old church, and the former church hall at the back houses the main part of the gallery. Racks of rolled-up canvases line the walls, interspersed with stretched canvases hung or resting against walls.

In the midst of all the paintings nestles an eclectic collection of furniture, creating a comfortable living room, complete with a dolls' house and some toy boxes.
Despite just rushing from another gallery where he is in the middle of hanging a major exhibition, Torres, with tousled hair and lively, intelligent eyes, exudes a calm influence as he sits back and lounges in a chair.
"We had a house near the beach," Torres says, "but my kids never liked going there, they would rather stay here. So we just turned this into a home. It's very enjoyable living among the artwork; the kids seem to blend into it quite well and, although they run around pretty harshly, they don't seem to do any damage."
There are plans to convert the main part of the church into a contemporary art space but with an average of an exhibition a month to organise, Torres has not had much time in which to co-ordinate and do the renovations. The space will be part-museum, part-gallery; a place where he can show his prize pieces.
"It will be a place where my family and I feel at home and other people can come to enjoy it. We'll use those works to promote other works that are for sale," says Torres, whose family connections give him unique access to the artists he represents and also afford him credibility with galleries and collectors.
“One of the big problems we had when we first started looking at indigenous paintings was authorship,” says Savah Hatzis, of gallery Savah in Sydney.
“Fred could assure me that the authorship of the painting was in unequivocal. We then knew we were selling authentic work. That made our clients very happy, of course, because they knew the money was going back to the community,” he explains.
The works Torres sells are all by artists from the utopia region, situated 270kms NE of Alice Springs, next to the traditional land of the Eastern Anmatyarre and the Alyawarre people. In the late 1970’s indigenous women from the area were introduced to batik painting through the adult education program.
These batik works brought income into the community and also captured the attention of the art world. In the late 1980’s these same artists were introduced to paint, brushes and canvases, and the Utopia art movement was launched, led by the astonishing work of the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye. She, like Rover Thomas in the Kimberleys, became a seminal figure for the movement.
“Utopia became distinctively different in the early days because of the use of colour,” says Torres. “They used a lot more colour in their work and stepped outside the strict traditional symbols and designs of Aboriginal art. They stepped out into abstraction a lot earlier than the other communities. That was noticed, then everyone became a lot more dare devil in what they were doing.”
This use of colour and sense of abstraction in indigenous art has made it a darling of the contemporary art world and very collectable for cash-up investors and art lovers.
“Everybody loves it,” says Savah Hatzis, who sell the art in Sydney and internationally. “Its abstract and it is contemporary, and you can fit it into modern homes and it looks fabulous. From an art perspective , it get a a very direct response from the audience.”
Sydney architect and serious art collector Dale Jones-Evans says the work also rings bells in the contemporary arena because of the flat picture plane on which the artists paint.
Through buying art from DACOU, Jones-Evans has become friends with Torrens and has traveled to Utopia many times to meet the artists and see them work. Torres’ close community ties provide the kind of access other galleries might not be able to offer. 
“He obviously has a deepened sense of cultural relations and kin,” says Jones-Evans, “and if you’re taken in by Fred, you’re taken into his world and I think that’s quite different to many other art dealers who are not privileged to have that relationship with their own people.  You have a more intimate insight into how things work, how people are, how they behave.” 
“It’s definitely a much more personal connection when they deal through DACOU,” says Torres, because, obviously, it is family and it is a second home for me. It is much easier for me to be able to take them through the land and know what I’m doing and know where to go and feel very comfortable doing it.”
Torres frequently takes his dealers to the community and has also taken small groups of collectors. “I think it is important for the dealers to know where the art is coming from and how the artwork is produced so they can actually talk about it with their clients.”
And there’s plenty to talk about because there is much more to these paintings than colour and abstraction; they are informed by thousands of years of culture.
The paintings of the Utopia region depict the Dreaming of its people, often using motifs drawn from the traditions of ceremonial body painting.  Unlike some other communities, such as Papunya, further west in the Northern Territory, its Dreamings are not usually narrative.  The paintings, instead, are expressions of respect for Dreamings that might be a plant or an animal, the wind or the rain, or perhaps a form of bush tucker or bush medicine.
“It’s always been a little bit more difficult for me to explain to a lot of our clients,” says Torres, “because if we have clients that are also buying works from Papunya, they will say, well, what’s the Dreaming story behind it? And I will say, well, it’s the grass seed Dreaming; there’s no actual story, it is about the grass that grows and when the seeds grow the seeds are collected, then they are made into flour,” he explains.
About 80% of DACOU’s painters are women and there is a cultural reason for this.
“The men are much more serious in their colours because men are usually the owners of the land.  Women can have a bit more fun with it.”
Torres explains that the women are much more flexible in the way they paint and more willing to try new things. Over the years, he has introduced the women to a whole range of art materials. He says he’s bought just about everything you can buy in an art shop, from crayons to pencils to oils, and taken them back to Utopia to let the artists play around with them.  So, although the stories are sacred and ancient, the paintings are a vibrant, living, changing, art form.
“The fact the artists have new materials to work with and can use new colours or new types of brushes is a really good thing,” says Torres. “They’re experimenting and now challenging themselves as artists, as recognized artists who are allowed to play, even though they’ve had no formal training.”
Torres regularly conducts workshops both in Adelaide and Utopia, for the artists to get together and paint.  These are fun communal times when stories are told and work shared.
“If we do a workshop in the desert, we would definitely go hunting first, so when we come back we’ve got some food,” says Torres.  “Someone will then be in charge of cooking the food and we will just divide up the jobs of preparing the canvases and paint.”
Earlier this year, Torres traveled overseas, visiting art galleries in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and San Diego.
He says he held few expectations but was overwhelmed with the enthusiastic response he received. “A lot of their (the galleries) clients who are seeing Aboriginal art for the first time are taking it on board as something that’s new, fresh and exciting and cultural, and find it very interesting that it comes from an uneducated artform, in that none of the artists are educated or trained in art.”
DACOU will be exhibiting at the Robert Steele Gallery in New York in June and there are planes for a franchised DACOU gallery to open its doors in the Big Apple later this year.

Torres recently hosted a visit by Frenchman Luc Berthier, director of the renown African Muse Gallery in Paris, which already has some of Utopia’s painters on its books. Berthier says Parisians have been somewhat slow at taking up Aboriginal art and it is still seen as ‘exotic’. “Unfortunately, French people are very conservative,” Berthier say. “They only want things that are already in the museum. It is a little problem that way. But I have good clients, I have people [who are] very open. But it goes slowly. It’s a long work [to get the art accepted]. It has to be through events, through exhibitions, through museums, things like that.”
Not to be defeated by the French resistance. Berthier spent his time in Australia sourcing works for an exhibition which he plans to sell to a museum in Paris. This, he hopes will help promote Aboriginal art and convince Parisians of its value and authenticity as an art form which, like Fred Torres himself, crosses worlds with consummate ease.

Aboriginal Art by Aboriginal Artists