20TH CENTURY PAINTING IN FRANCE, BELGIUM, SPAIN AND ITALY
TORRES-GARCÍA, Joaquín (Montevideo, 1874 – Montevideo, 1949)
Free Forms
1943
Tempera sobre cardboard, 50 x 58 cm
Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
In the 1940s Torres-García gradually abandoned the style that had characterised his painting during the previous decade. It was a period of intense activity, which he spent both teaching and spreading his theories. In 1941 he started a series of radio talks on the role of modern art in art history. In the following two years, while intensifying his activity in the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (Constructive Art Association), he met the young abstract artists of the Arturo group from Buenos Aires. At the same time, he worked on a systematic compilation of his writings and lectures that was published in Buenos Aires in 1944 with the title Universalismo Constructivo (Constructive Universalism).
His work during those years of theoretic endeavour was marked by a great freedom and varied interests and, at the same time, by an ascetic reduction of pictorial resources. Most of the paintings he executed in that period have a relatively small format and are painted on cardboard. The composition we are analysing should be inscribed in that context. It belongs to a small group of works which show, on a monochrome neutral background, a constellation of pictographic signs floating freely in the space.
The first impression we have when we set eyes on Free Forms is that this would be the image left if the artist had removed from a 1930s painting the orthogonal grid, leaving only the pictograms; we feel inclined to think that the grid is still there, invisible, imposing its order, but if we try to visualise it the task proves to be impossible. It is as if the pictograms (the “forms”, in the artist’s vocabulary, for whom they had the value of platonic ideas) assumed, once they became free, the capacity to establish their own world by themselves, beyond any geometrical or rational regulation.
Tomàs Llorens
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