Luisa Palacios Prize at the 2025 Elsa Morales National Art Salon

Honys Torres presents Chronicles of Mercy Reloaded, winner of the Luisa Palacios Prize at the 2025 Elsa Morales National Art Salon

Zurich / Caracas, 2025. Venezuelan artist Honys Torres has been awarded the Luisa Palacios Prize at the 2025 Elsa Morales National Art Salon for her series Chronicles of Mercy Reloaded, a collection of 20 works that function as a contemporary visual archive—irreverent, incisive, and deeply critical of the events that have shaped the world in recent decades.

The collection, conceived as a pop diary of humanity, blends digital collage, global iconography, mass culture, and political symbolism to construct a unique visual language: sharp, vibrant, uncomfortable, and lucid. Each piece operates as a chronicle that dismantles official narratives, exposes contradictions, and reveals the theatricality of power, culture, and society.

A collection that documents the world through excess, irony, and memory

The 20 works that make up Chronicles of Mercy Reloaded explore themes ranging from geopolitics to pop culture, from spirituality to media manipulation. Highlights include:

Political conflict and power narratives

• NO —The clash between Uribe and Santos and the 2016 Colombian referendum, transformed into a political comic about impunity and spectacle.

• Capital Flight —Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez in satirical form, denouncing populism, corruption, and the economic collapse of 21st‑century socialism.

• The Successor —Mao and Ronald McDonald as symbols of the Chinese and American markets, locked in a commercial war of copies, e‑commerce, and legal loopholes.

Identity, the body, and media spectacle

• Vanity Fair —Caitlyn Jenner carrying her former self, a reflection on gender transition between media visibility and real‑world inequality.

• +100? —Stephen Hawking as a pop oracle, surrounded by warnings about AI, climate collapse, and an uncertain future.

Global culture, spirituality, and symbolic collision

• All‑Inclusive —Ganesha and the sacred cow in a psychedelic carnival that questions Western interpretations of Indian spirituality in the world’s most populous nation.

• India / All‑Inclusive variations —A look at India’s demographic rise and its growing cultural influence beyond its borders.

Social critique, consumption, and emotional capitalism

• The Successor, Genuine Fake, Fresh Product, Red Alert, Sweet, Te lo tengo, Boom, The Bear, NEIN, Enough, The King Is Naked, among others, complete a visual map where the following intersect:

  • culture wars

  • migration

  • media manipulation

  • state violence

  • celebrity culture

  • global icons

  • climate crisis

  • technology and surveillance

  • economic inequality

  • the aestheticization of disaster

Each work functions simultaneously as a visual document, a historical commentary, and an act of memory.

Cultural value: art as an archive of the present

Chronicles of Mercy Reloaded stands as a series that documents the world through art, transforming images, headlines, symbols, and characters into a critical atlas of the 21st century. Its cultural value lies in:

• Documenting global events through an independent artistic lens

• Questioning official narratives through humor, irony, and pop aesthetics

• Transforming contemporary visual saturation into critical thought

• Connecting the intimate with the political, the local with the global

• Creating visual memory in an era of hyperconsumption and accelerated forgetting

The Luisa Palacios Prize recognizes not only the aesthetic power of the series, but its ability to think the world through image, satire, and contemporary sensibility.