ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the sensory field of the work of Torres-Garcia and shows how the conceptual infrastructure of Constructive Universalism is the misrecognition of its own artworks. It explores how Constructive Universalism's discourse is undermined by visual tactics that work against presumed systematicity by three tactics: graphism, manuscription and hypericonicity. Tomas Llorens presents his "semiotic interpretation" as the most adequate reading of Torres-Garcia's work in that it remains faithful to the master's conception of the sign as archetype, as "mental image", harvested from a deep, psychic repertoire of universal pictograms. Torres-Garcia's theory of painting, which is also a metaphysics, posits that if there is any relation to nature, in other words, if there is any trace of the iconic in grafismo or his paintings at large, this trace is merely incidental. The theory of graphism is itself a product of coloniality, written in the language of hearing so as to provoke the memory of the language of sight and hand.
