Joaquín Torres-García settled in Barcelona in 1892. He began his artistic studies there, and frequented the café Els Quatre Gats, a meeting place for Catalan intellectuals and artists. He was influenced by Puvis de Chavannes, and aligned himself with the Catalan Nouecento, which advocated a return to classicism based on the Mediterranean tradition looking back to the classical age. Applied to South American history, these references were condensed and restated in Estructura en Gris (Structure in Grey), following an aesthetic turning point in favour of modernism, marked by the publication of El Descubrimiento de Sí Mismo in 1917. While in Barcelona he also began to make wooden toys, developing the idea of creating complex structures from elementary geometrical shapes; an approach which, when applied to painting, determines the ordering of the pictorial plane.

In 1926, now in Paris, having spent time in New York and Italy, he allied himself with international constructivism and was a co-founder of the Cercle et Carré group, whose members included Mondrian. At this point Vieira da Silva also became aware of his work, and the two began a correspondence. In Uruguay, where he lived from 1934, he stated that «the artist works with shapes, not with things, because he is concerned with visual arrangements, not with reproducing things as they appear.»* We can see the programmatic direction of his constructive universalism in Estructura en Gris. This piece is roughly based on the modelling of the structure on a rectangular plane, which is dominated by the golden rule, and the use of signs. In this way he resolves the dilemma of the visual transition of nature to the abstract by making use of a symbolic language that appeals to the mind of every viewer, without relinquishing the timelessness that had long fascinated him in the art of the classical period in Europe and South America. Retaining different layers of meaning the painter ends up delineating a material vocabulary that offers the possibility of making connections between the signs drawn on the different areas marked on the painting. Thus, he enhances the interpretative liberty of the viewer through the relationship between motifs whose referents are as far removed from one another as the distance between two mentioned continents.

For example, we might speculate whether the use of inverted VVs and semi-circles alludes to architecture and the different construction methods involved in erecting arches (the Mayan vault and the Roman arch respectively), as they are drawn on a background where the stony grey on top of a coat of ochre paint seems to assert the weather-resistant nature of stone itself. This synthesis, both formal and symbolic, supports Torres-García’s argument that the South American continent must be defined not by its isolation, but rather through an understanding of the international modern world combined with local values.

André Silveira
May 2010

* Available at www.torresgarcia.org.uy/uc_70_1.html. [consulted in October 2009]