Horacio Torres, the son of the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García, was born in 1924 in Livorno, Italy. After years of travelling, the family left Europe to finally settle in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1934. Due to the influence of his father, Torres quickly became a member of the Association of Constructivist Art and The Taller Torres-García. In his early career, Horacio Torres pursued in an exemplary way the principles of Torres García’s art theory (1944) through the use of geometric figures, primary colours, and an imagery culturally associated with a childish innocence, which he linked with complex regional symbols. Although The White Ship (1950 ca.) could be considered as part of the slow transition of his interest towards figuration, we can observe that in this narrative depiction of a travelling subject, easily associated with the history of his family’s own migration, geometric shapes and strong reticular lines remain as a constructive scheme of organisation within the painting. In that sense, this piece not only materialises his father’s artistic theory but also marks a point of departure for his own study of the connections between avant-garde repertoires and Latin American symbolic traditions.
This is the first time the work of Horacio Torres is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Nicolas Cuello
