Introduction

This chapter outlines Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García's 'scenario of exile'. Torres-Garcia's many arrivals and departures led to a heterodox aesthetic philosophy, which treated the avant-garde on the same plane as the atavistic, and where the 'radical idea' of abstraction was but the recurrence of an eternal principle. Aged sixty, Torres-Garcia ended his prolonged European 'aesthetic education'. It was in Montevideo, after his return to Latin America, that Garcia's project of renewal assumed concrete form and turned resolutely to the Southern hemisphere. Initially, Garcia coined the term 'Constructive Universalism' in Paris in 1932 to differentiate his own praxis from the hegemony of cubism, geometric abstraction and neoplasticism. Metaphysical nostalgia is inverted by plastic works that testify to the actuality of post-Columbian heterogeneity and a poetics of ambiguity. Constructive Universalism desires to divert the course of history to make art and life culminate in a ritual continuum that restores the integrity of a lost past through the reactivation of (pre-)Incaic cosmology.