The key discovery for the new pictorial language that Torres-García calls “constructive universalism” is that of a repertoire of forms that look like pictograms. The artist explains this development in his autobiography, Historia de mi vida, written in the third person: “His art is in a moment of transition—a struggle between nature and abstraction—and it will still take a long year to solve this problem, the difficulty is that if he composes a painting with only abstract, geometric or irregular forms, what will he do with something that he would also like to express and that has to do with concrete things? Trying to unite both (done a hundred times) nature loses, and also lost is the plastic construction, but one day he thinks: the abstract must correspond, as an idea of something, something likewise abstract. What can this be? It will have to be, to be graphically figurative, either the written name of the thing, or a schematic image that is as seemingly further from the real as possible: such as a sign, and he does this: he puts, in a sectional construction, like a wall of stones, in each segment, the design of a thing, and that's it! It must be that. [...] Yes, that's it, but only the beginning of the road, as will be seen later. [...] By pure chance ... (or, if not, emerging from the depths of him) not by chance, then, but by unconsciously obeying an internal vision, he placed, in that first work and in the respective sections, a House (like those that children draw), a Boat, an Anchor, the letter B, a Man, a Fish .... And he showed that painting, as he used to and among others, to a friend of Cueto’s, a well-known writer, Germán List Arzubide. He stood for a long time looking at it without saying a word. And said at last: I see here something very big: the World...”
The artistic problem that Torres-García poses seems to consist, as we have seen, in the desire to find a kind of synthesis between representation and abstraction. The solution is presented when he appeals to the use of signs. Like the mimetic image, the sign has a referent—an entity external to itself—to which it refers and, in some way, represents. But, like purely plastic elements, such as the lines of a Mondrian painting, the sign does not perceptually resemble that entity, nor anything that is external to it, and in that sense, it can be said to be autonomous, abstract. It is therefore representative on one hand, and abstract, in the other. How much does this formula clarify? Above I mentioned the similarity between Torres-García's Constructivist art and Analytic Cubism, a pictorial language that also posed the problem of the synthesis between the mimetic function and the abstract function of pictorial forms.

Tomas Llorens