Virgil Art House presents Against the Light, a new photography exhibition by Los Angeles-based photographer and visual artist Mario Nicholas Torres, featuring his ongoing collaboration with model and muse Janelle Paramoure. The exhibition opens October 22 at 7 PM at Virgil Art House, 620 N. Hoover St., Los Angeles.
Rendered in stark black and white, the photographs explore the body as both subject and canvas. Janelle’s tattoos shift between representation and abstraction as light, shadow, form, and ink become inseparable. Rather than simply documenting a person, the series reflects what can happen when photographer and subject build an image together through trust, movement, and creative collaboration.
What to Expect
- Eight photographs from the Against the Light series
- Meet photographer Mario Nicholas Torres
- Meet model and muse Janelle Paramoure
- Framed prints available for purchase
- Art, conversation, and community at Virgil Art House
- Free admission with RSVP
About the artists
Torres brings decades of experience to the work. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2023, he spent twenty years working in New York City’s fashion photography industry alongside photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Arthur Elgort, Miles Aldridge, Craig McDean, and Mark Seliger. He began making his own photographs more than fifteen years ago, turning his attention toward people, bodies, and stories that exist outside conventional ideas of beauty.
His work moves between portraiture, fashion, and fine art, with a strong instinct for dramatic light, intimacy, and the unexpected. His photography has appeared in group exhibitions in New York and in independent publications, while his commercial work has included clients such as Nike, Brooks Brothers, Sleepy Jones, and Theory.
For Janelle, the collaboration reflects a lifelong relationship with art from both sides of the frame. As a collector, collaborator, subject, and muse, she has developed a deep connection to art, music, fashion, and subculture. She began getting tattooed at eighteen, gradually transforming her body into an evolving collection of work by multiple artists. Her interest in the body as a living canvas eventually led her toward figure modeling and photography, where vulnerability, movement, and self-expression become part of the image itself.
Against the Light brings these two perspectives together in a series that is intimate, graphic, and unapologetically human.
Join us October 22 at 7 PM to experience the exhibition, meet the artist and model, and view the full series in person. Prints in various sizes will be available for sale.
