Construction in White and Black

Joaquín Torres-García, 1938 · Gallery 512 · Floor 5

It's built like a wall. White blocks, each shaded down one side so the paint looks like stone sticking out. Black lines between them. A little uneven. Now think of an Inca wall. No mortar. Each stone cut to fit the next. In places, you can't get a sheet of paper between them. Joaquín Torres-García wants those walls in your head when you look at this. He's from Uruguay, but he's spent most of his life away. In Paris, he helps start an artists' group called Circle and Square. Mondrian's in it. So he knows the people making modern art out of lines and rectangles. He's one of them. Then he goes home to Montevideo and turns a map of South America upside down. The continent points up. "Our North is the South," he says. Basically, Paris doesn't get to decide which way is up. Or which rectangles count as modern. The Inca had been fitting shapes together in stone for centuries. Torres-García starts an art group and teaches younger artists to work with what he brought home from Europe and what was already here. Now look at the painting again. The grid he worked with in Paris is here. But those little shadows make the blocks feel heavy. The lines look like joints between stones. He's put both histories in the same wall. At the bottom, he writes AAC. That's his new art group in Montevideo. This looks like it could stand for five hundred years. It's painted on cardboard. Glued to wood.

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