Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

A Latin American Metaphysical Perspective 2000 Autumn



A Latin American Metaphysical Perspective: Aizenberg, Batlle Planas, Botero, Bonevardi, Buzio, Fonseca, Maza, Montiel, Siqueiros, Storm, Tamayo, A. Torres, H. Torres, Torres-García

More Latin American artists surrendered to the attractions of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra's Pittura Metafisica than did their North American counterparts. The "metaphysical aesthetic" had great appeal to the fondness for legends and myths that runs deep through the Latin American "collective unconscious."

The word "metaphysical," as used in the titles of several paintings in the exhibition, suggests a mysterious reality beyond the normal world they purport to depict. The supernatural lighting, the incongruous placement of objects, the structure created by the architecture of sharp lines in perspective generate a poetic and usually ominous atmosphere.

Latin American literature influenced and supported the development of this quality in the plastic arts. The writings of the Uruguayan-born French poet, Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont, 1846-1870), were a precursor of the metaphysical and the surreal. His Chants de Maldoror, with its startling metaphors and dislocations, was widely read in the 1940s. Jorge Luis Borges's preoccupation with Man's place in a labyrinthine universe of circular time and of a reality reflected infinitely in mirrors provided painters with rich material for their imagination.

The works chosen for the exhibition illustrate various approaches to the subject from the figurative to the geometric. The artists differ in their interests and backgrounds, yet their work has an otherworldly quality and the distinct flavor that perpetuates the tradition of Pittura Metafisica.

Roberto Aizenberg's paintings of buildings are like visual renderings of where the stories of Borges unravel. Marcelo Bonevardi's beautifully made constructions combine painting, sculpture and architecture and share with Borges a metaphysical quest. Battle Planas, an enthusiast of psychoanalysis, Zen philosophy, and psychic automatism, and who had a major influence on Argentine Surrealism, developed an intimate and poetical aesthetic.

Fernando Botero, while in Florence in the 1950s, was also seduced by Carra's work, as in the exhibited painting where the long shadows of man and horses stretch across an endless plain. Lidya Buzio, inspired by the cast iron architecture of lower Manhattan, creates wall assemblages of buildings and roof-line vistas that subtly play with our perception of perspective. Fernando MazaÕs architectural constructs painted in soft pastel colors fashion a poetic dislocation by his juxtaposition of shapes and symbols against a horizon of calm sea.

As Octavio Paz pointed out, David A. Siqueiros's 1919 visit to Carlo Carra in Milan inspired the mannequins and automatons of his later murals and paintings. His 1936 Cosmos & Disaster is a metaphysical view of war. Rufino Tamayo appropriates De Chirico's eerie sense of arrangement in order to create a rhythmic tension between the seemingly isolated elements in the two gouaches on exhibition.

In the late 1940s under the spell of De Chirico, the Taller Torres-García artists Gonzalo Fonseca, Jonio Montiel, Augusto and Horacio Torres, painted numerous landscapes using Montevideo's plazas and harbor as their focus. Fonseca's later sculptures contained the inexplicable, and he often employed unexpected objects in his work. Both Montiel and later Juan Storm contemplated the metaphysical in many of their paintings. In Horacio Torres's mature nudes the sense of mystery is palpable. And Augusto Torres continued to paint with a metaphysical edge throughout his life.

At the turn of the century, when they were young, both Torres-García in Barcelona and De Chirico in Munich, were drawn to the dreamy, mysterious atmosphere of Arnold Bšcklin's canvases. Torres-García's 1946 Iglesia Metafísica, is a rare example of his incursion into the "metaphysical aesthetic." After all, the aim of the Parisian group Cercle et Carré that he co-founded in 1930 with Michel Seuphor had been to fight Surrealism, the offspring of De Chrico's Pittura Metafisica.



Joaquín Torres-García

Joaquín Torres-García 1874 - 1949

On April 30, 1934, when he arrived in Montevideo after forty-three years of absence, Torres-García told the press that he had returned to Uruguay in order to "develop a wide range of activities, to lecture, to teach courses, to achieve... on walls what I have already achieved on canvas,... to create in Montevideo a movement that will surpass the art of Paris."

"... the moral zeal and joy in art making that Torres-García inculcated in his students, gives evidence of what a vibrant creation Latin American modernism was. It was technically at least as accomplished as its counterpart in the pre-Abstract Expressionist New York of the 30's and 40's, but improved upon it in one crucial respect: it transformed a borrowed European style into one deeply expressive of a New World culture. By Torres-García's standards, the work produced by El Taller was the genuine utopian article, and for anyone interested in modernism today, it is certainly an art to be reckoned with."
Holland Cotter, The New York Times, December 4, 1992

Since he had emigrated to Spain before his seventeenth birthday, he had no family ties in his native country. Nevertheless, Torres' declarations revealed a clear and ambitious plan. This was no passing visit; there was something definitive in his words that indicated that his return had been a deliberate act.

After a long development, during which his painting evolved from the Mediterranean classicism of his Barcelona frescoes of 1913 and passed through periods of Vibrationism, Cubism, and Fauvism, it culminated in 1929 in what was to become his characteristic incorporation of symbols into a geometric grid based on the golden section.

For Torres-García, the symbol was a way of synthesizing idea and form while bypassing narrative, which would interfere with the unity of the work. He called this conjunction of idea and form the nexus between the vital (or living) and the abstract. By inserting a symbol representing humanistic values into the antithetical rational structure of neoplasticism (which was devoid of human references), Torres succeeded in creating a style that constituted a major contribution to modern art. He called it Constructive Universalism.

What Torres-García envisioned as the new art for the Americas would encompass all expressions from architecture to the most humble utilitarian object. This was not an American version of the Russian constructivist movement or the Bauhaus; his aim was to create a modern art for the new continent equal in scope to the art of the greatest civilizations of antiquity. The uniqueness of Torres' proposal consisted of his incorporation of essential elements of indigenous American art into the basic principles of European constructivism and geometric abstraction.

His conception of art had a metaphysical and spiritual dimension - a faith in the spiritual value of art as a creative act bound to a universal law - and - in the independent existence of a work of art, apart from its naturalistic contents.

[Excerpted from the essay by Cecilia de Torres in El Taller Torres-García, The School of the South and Its Legacy, University of Texas Press, 1992.]


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Lidya Buzio

Sculptor of painted surfaces, for over thirty years Buzio has created abstract volumes and cityscapes.  Working conceptually she creates the sculptural form that best address the tonal coloring or landscape that she will paint.  Buzio’s ceramic sculptures twist and juxtapose the structure and light of New York.

Buzio’s work is in the Painting & Sculpture Collections of the Brooklyn Museum & the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; in the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Fine Arts Museums; Nelson-Atkins; Everson; Victoria & Albert, London; Taiwan National Museum; and many other museums and private collections, internationally.

A catalogue of her work with an essay by Garth Clark and an extensive chronology is in preparation.


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Gonzalo Fonseca

Born in Montevideo in 1922, Fonseca traveled frequently to Europe with his family visiting museums and archeological sites that made a great impression on him.  At 15, he learned to sculpt in stone.  In 1939, Fonseca enrolled in the College of Architecture of Montevideo, but by 1942, he abandoned his architectural studies and joined the Taller Torres-García.  Along with Jonio Montiel, Sergio de Castro and Julio Alpuy in 1945, he traveled through Argentina, Peru and Bolivia to study pre-Columbian art.  In 1950, Fonseca moved to Paris, then Rome in 1951.  He traveled through North Africa and the Middle East where he joined in excavations directed by Petrie Flinters.  Living in Madrid in 1953, Fonseca studied ceramics at Rosedal - La Moncloa and met the Spanish sculptor Jorge de Oteiza.  In 1956, he returned to Montevideo and in 1958, moved to New York.  In 1970, Fonseca began working in Italy, near Carrara, on large marble pieces.  Fonseca lived and worked in New York and Seravezza, Italy.  He died in Italy, June 11, 1997.


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Augusto Torres

Born in Tarrasa, Cataluña, 1913; died in Barcelona, 1992. 

The first son of Torres-García, Augusto grew up primarily in Italy and France. In 1927, the family shared a house with the painter Jean Hélion, who inspired Augusto in his passion for collecting North African and American Indian art. Hired by the Musée de l’Homme to document their Pre-Columbian pottery, he studied tribal and primitive art. In the early 1930s, Augusto was an apprentice to the sculptor Julio González and studied drawing in Amedée Ozenfant’s academy. After Torres-García brought his family to Uruguay in 1934, Augusto participated in all the activities of his father’s teaching atelier, the Taller Torres-García. Throughout his life, Augusto traveled widely; including two years living in New York City, a recipient of a New School grant. From 1973 on, he divided his time between Barcelona and Montevideo. An inspirational teacher, he instructed several of today’s fine young artists.


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Horacio Torres

Of the many painters who studied with his father, the great Constructivist artist Joaquín Torres-García, Horacio Torres made the quantum leap into the Contemporary art world of abstract and expressionistic painters in New York's 1970s. That he did so with figurative canvases was a singular achievement. Taken under the wing of the critic Clement Greenberg, who understood that Horacio's work was really about painting and was thoroughly modern, Horacio explored the thunderous territory of Titian, Velasquez and late Goya with a unique background of skill and aesthetic education in a contemporary way. Thus the series of headless nudes and of figures with faces obscured, make clear his painterly intentions and concerns. His monumental canvases are wondrous exercises of painted imagination formed with the structure of the depicted figure, but they are not about nudes, they are about painting.


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