Colecciones de arte

Constructivo en blanco y negro «TBA», 1933

FICHA TÉCNICA
Constructivo en blanco y negro «TBA», 1933
Oil on wood 57,5 x 33,6 cm

Black on white. Light and its absence. An absolute synthesis, a maximum reduction of elements. Many cells of varying sizes emerge from a grid showing a dynamic orthogonal regularity that scores the plane.Each cell holds one or more elements, basic signs that look like residues of more complex cultural productions, or perhaps primitive drawings that the artist has rescued.Surely both intentions are—or at least appear to be—operating in these simple symbolic constructions that Torres García presents in Constructivo en Blanco y Negro “TBA” (Constructive painting in black and white “TBA”).

Decoding these graphic signs assumes two initial operations. The first is the recognition of each sign:man, woman, horse, fish, clock, sun, moon, numbers, letters.... The second involves the association of these elements with one another and their articulation with the symbolic memory of Western imagery. This second level of reading leads to an interpretation that gives these simple elements another scale and places them in a more complex account that remits us again and again to such questions as the beginnings of life, the circular nature of time, the distribution of space—that place where man develops, but also the North-South spatial division implied by politics and which acquires special significance in Torres’ work.

He produced obsessively. He tried out his principles in each work, putting them to the test again and again. Meanwhile, he expounded his reflections in a set of highly regulatory, standard-setting texts. “The complete object exists only in our heads,” Torres asserted. “If we have the complete object in our minds, to be able to give it a graphic representation, we will choose—almost without perceiving the act of choosing—the essential parts and will construct a sketch that, if it does not adhere to the rules of perspective, will nevertheless be much more illustrative. This is the spirit of synthesis.”

In a dual operation of plastic exploration and theoretical reflection, Torres formulated his creative project in dialog with the artists associated with the reviews De Stijl, Art Concret, and Cercle et Carré. The latter review is the publication that, through the initiative of Seuphor and Torres, brought together from 1930 onward most of the artists who were linked with what they would generically define as “pure art” proposals.

In Constructivo en Blanco y Negro “TBA,” exhibited for the first time at the Salón de Arte Concreto in Madrid—as in the rest of Torres’ works made from 1928 on in Paris, between 1932 and 1933 in Madrid and from 1934 onwards in Montevideo—the graphic elements lead the viewer from an instantaneous reading to another, more reflective one. Still, both readings take us to the aspiration to the universal (at least insofar as the infinite set of Western symbolic conventions can be “universal”). In keeping with the assumptions underlying first neoplasticism and subsequently concrete art, he sought—in the words of van Doesburg—to free the media of expression from all of their particular aspects so as to be in harmony with the ultimate purpose of art, which is to reach the universal language.

In the first issue of Art Concret, Torres García gave some of the keys to the proposal that he had begun militantly to deploy some years earlier. “To put things in order would be an accomplishment,” but the most important thing is “to create an order” that is, “to establish a plan.” Thus art would “evolve from the individual to the universal.” Further on he added: “currently: if the plastic constructor, basing himself on the pure ideas in his mind, can construct, then the artist can also do so based on his intuitions. If feeling or reasoning is included in the basis for construction, it should not matter to us: our only objective is to construct.The opposite pole of the constructive sense is representation.... Construction must, above all, be the creation of an order.”

This text, which appeared on the first page of the first issue of the Parisian review, reveals a Torres García placed in the eye of the storm, at the epicenter of one of the debates of contemporary art. This inevitably induces us to re-examine the metropolitan climates of opinion and the relative position of the artists who had come to the metropolis from peripheral regions.Why did Torres take on this militant role? The answer is complex and has to do not only with his strategies for integrating himself into the Parisian art world, but also—perhaps as an additional component of those strategies—with the way he positioned himself before the problems of modern art.

If the plasticist experiences begun in 1917 can be identified as antecedents to the change of perspective that he assumed with respect to the modern movement, it was the experience of Paris, it was the humus of that strange and plural combination of elements coming from different latitudes and the existence of the material conditions required for the production and circulation of ideas, works, debates, which constitute invaluable material. These metropolitan conditions enabled Torres quickly to assume a strongly constructive perspective, thus giving continuity to a battle with the plastic arts tradition and against the canonic forms of representation that had been established. This battle began in the first decade of the centurywith the advent of cubism, and was continued by the constructivists, neoplasticists and practitioners of concrete art.

Torres persisted, sought to differentiate himself and put forward, in the context of the battle, an alternative position based on a developmental principle that conceived artistic evolution as a series of stages in a process that had a manifest destiny: universal art. In this regard, he insisted on the need to create an order and his works would embody this principle again and again. Each of them achieved the possibility ofbeing perceived as manufactured entities, with rules and a characteristic demand to be read. Just as Picasso proposed in the framework of his cubist experiments, and particularly with the collage,a work of art should be presented as an independent object that would become a tableau objet.But Torres strove to go beyond this proposal since, in his estimation, cubism had retained, despite everything, too many mimetic residues; he saw it as “structured naturalistic painting.” Rising above these limitations would, in his mind, be a matter of achieving synthesis.

In search his search for that synthesis, he investigated primitive cultures. In this regard, although in 1917 he had begun to renounce the classic tradition (albeit with some “bending” of this principle during the 1920s that led him to take up classicist experiences again), as he approached the imperatives of “purist art,” he began to recover another tradition, to align his practice in another historical sequence—the cultures of classical Antiquity—as well as the cultures of African peoples and of the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas. His interest in primitive cultures marked a turning point in his poetics. Already in Art Concret he stated that “the greater the spirit of synthesis is of the person who designs, he will give us a constructed image. The designs of all the primitive peoples, Negroes, Aztecs, etc., and the Egyptian and Chaldean designs, etc. are a beautiful example.” Only that spirit of synthesis was capable of constructing an entire work; it was that synthesis that he sought and that would impose unity on the works. Synthesis, unity, structure and totality were key terms to define his esthetics. They were the tools with which he would make not only his works but the theoretical formulations expressed in his writings and lectures, as well as in the rules he imposed on his students for their work in his studio.

InEstructura (Structure), he extensively propounded and developed all his precepts and solidly built the pillars of his theory . “Our theory of art can be summarized as geometry, creation and proportion. Assuredly, it goes beyond the three movements on which, to some extent, we base ourselves:cubism, neoplasticism and surrealism.” The failure of cubism to abandon mimesis, the problem of reductionism affecting neoplasticism and the vestiges of the literary in surrealism led him to confront them, although not in opposition to them, but rather as a continuation of these movements, as a more advanced stage moving beyond the limitations of these formulations.

If the gestures, actions and resources brought into play by the Uruguayan were part of a possible—and imaginary—modern artist’s manual, his way of placing himself in a tradition of continuity rather than of breaks with other approaches, is something that he exhibited outside the avant-garde drift: instead of manifestos, he preferred to write long treatises, instead of confrontations, he chose analyses and critical essays with respect to previous experiences. His theory, moreover, was involved regionally in a strong political commitment that distanced him from the metropolitan currents, even, in this regard, from more “universalist” ambitions.

Our north is the South, he asserted: “we turn the map upside down, and then we have a just idea of our hemisphere, not the view they prefer in the other part of the world. The tip of America extending itself thus points insistently to the south, our north. So does our compass: it irremissibly swings to the south, toward our pole.... Because the North is now down here.”

By inverting the map he hoped to invert the course of history. When he returned to Montevideo in 1934 he committed himself to the present: the here and now.He recovered the peculiar dimensions of the South American territory: “the great solitudes of the sea, where other winds reign,” other lands that build a different “mental state of consciousness” that would make it possible “to free ourselves of the protection of Europe” because from South America, “we must do it all.” Embarked on the transformation of ideological principles to adapt them to new times and objectives, Torres made his language explode in a plethora of formulas, lectures, books, and infinite teachings in the studio to contribute to the creation of a new horizon. In the end, perhaps he recovered, in America, a diverse avant-garde dimension, in the form of other avant-garde proposals from this part of the world, where building a new tradition is part of the modern utopia and—why not?—of a new avant-garde goal. D. W.

SIGNED

J. Torres-García33”at the bottom of the work, almost on the edge, in black over a rectangular field crossed by three arcs. In the first of these arcs, from left to right, ‘J. Torres’ appears. The ‘G’ is placed between the first and second arcs, and the rest of the surname is inside the second arc. The year 33 islocated in the third arc.The location of the signature and its distance from the date, within those arcs, builds a harmonic rhythm that plays with the rest of the elements in the painting.

ORIGIN

Torres-García Family, Montevideo / J. Lassaigne Collection, Paris / Royal S. Marks Collection, New York / Private Collection, New York / Siccardi Gallery, Houston.

EXHIBITIONS

Torres García: Construction et Symboles, Musée D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, París, 1975 / Torres García: Grid-Pattern-Sign, París-Montevideo, Hayward Gallery, Londres, 1985. Travelling to Barcelona.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Torres García: Construction et Symboles, Musée D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, August of 1975, Nº 33 / PONTUAL, R. America Latina: Geometria Sensivel, Rio de Janeiro, 1978, rep. p. 47 / Torres García: Grid-Pattern-Sign, Paris-Montevideo, Hayward Gallery, London, 1985. Traveling to Barcelona. Nº 60, p. 59 / GRADOWCZYK, M. Joaquín Torres García, Buenos Aires, 1985, rep. Nº 37, p. 58.

(1) Torres García, Joaquín , "Querer Construir" en : Art Concrète , nº1, abril de 1930,

( p.1) 1930 en: González García, A. Calvo Serraller, F., MarchÁn Fiz, S ., Escritos de arte de vanguardia 1900-1945 , Barcelona, Istmo, 1999, p. 278.

(2) Van Doesburg, Theo, cfr. “Pintura y escultura. Elementarismo (1925-1927),” in: De Stijl, vol. VII, Nº 78, pp. 82-87, and “Base de la pintura concreta (1930)” in: Art Concret, April 1930 in: González García, A. Calvo Serraller, F., MarchÁn Fiz, S., Escritos de arte de vanguardia 1900-1945, Barcelona, Istmo, 1999, pp. 258-270 and 284.

(3) TORRES GARCíA: «Querer construir...», op. cit.

(4) Torres García, Joaquín, Estructura , Montevideo, La regla de oro, s/f, p.112; introduction signed J. Torres-García and dated Montevideo, July 1935.

(5) Ibid.

(6) "La escuela del Sur", op. cit., pp.113-115.

(7) Ibid.