ABSTRACT
What is essential about the work of Torres-Garcia and Constructive Universalism is that it is a visual-verbal praxis animated by the ever-present tension between word and image, by the galvanizing antimony between the artwork and the discourse that claims to speak on its behalf. This chapter analyzes the mestizaje of the plastic works dislodging the claims of Constructive Universalism and presents some of the main tenets of Torres-Garcia's philosophy of art. It concerns the overall position of Torres-Garcia's discourse and its reception and addresses the specific form of the 'solution' that Constructive Universalism supposedly achieved. The chapter provides a critique of grafismo and the very idea of systematicity it is meant to uphold by turning away from Constructive Universalism as discursive formation and turning to the pictograms' visual opacity. In fact, the classification and inventory of ideograms into a universal cosmic grammar and semantics present the consolidation of a regime of legibility.
