Joaquín Torres-García was born and died in Montevideo, Uruguay, where, after forty-three years spent amongst European avant-gardes, he became one of Latin America’s leading advocates of abstraction. Retrato de V. P. (1941) was painted during a period of intense activity. Recently named an honorary professor of art by the Uruguayan government and broadcasting his lectures on the radio, Torres consolidated his role as a leading exponent of modernism in Latin America. While developing his theory and practice of Constructive Universalism, Torres continued to paint in other styles. The heavy impasto and murky palette of this painting of an unknown woman echoes earlier portraits, painted on commission while Torres was still struggling to live off his art in Europe. In Portrait of V. P., however, Torres integrated that figurative practice with structural elements of his idiosyncratic Constructivist style. Like his gridded canvases, Torres built form out of thickly applied planes of primary colours, modulating them with white and black to create textural tonal gradations. He based his composition on the golden section, a mathematically derived system of proportions that underlies the paint surface.
—Lucia Neirotti
