Joaquín Torres-García

While living in Paris between 1926 and 1932, Torres-García met Neo–Plasticist artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, with whom he created the Paris-based group Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square), composed of artists who favored geometric abstraction and opposed Parisian Surrealism. In accordance with the group's artistic tendencies, Torres–García adopted the grid in its most rigorous and geometric sense as a means to preserve the two–dimensionality of a picture. Color Structure belongs to a limited series of paintings and drawings he made between 1929 and 1930. Here the artist created allover patterns by dividing the picture surface into horizontal and vertical formations, each painted with different primary colors. Although Neo–Plasticists believed in the pure qualities of the grid, Torres–García emphasized instead the raw aspect of the composition, highlighting the imperfections of the canvas, the impurity of the colors, the thickness of the paint, and the manual tracing of the brushstrokes.