ART REVIEW : AUGUSTO TORRES: BUILDER OF PAINTINGS

SANTA BARBARA — Structure is the thing for Uruguayan painter Augusto Torres. It isn’t the first word in the title of his exhibition, “Form, Structure, Synthesis,” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (to Nov. 15), but it is the central one--and the concept that lies at the heart of his art.

Fifty years’ worth of drawings and paintings in the show come to life as artworks by way of the golden section (a system of ratios and proportions). Dividing rectangular canvases and sheets of paper into smaller rectangles, weighing each element against the others and constantly jostling proportion, Torres builds compositions as if he were an aesthetically sharp stone mason or a master tile setter. Before they are still lifes, street scenes or views of seaports, his works are deliberate subdivisions of pictorial space.

Which is not to say that Torres is fastidious. Shaggy lines, streaky surfaces and dull-colored pigments that expose patches of underpainting lend a rough appearance; clunky objects set forth on tables often read more like fists full of color than sculpted forms. But this is art that was weaned on Cubism and Purism. Even though it has been roughed up and weathered, its skeletal strength and muscular tension are undeniable. If these artworks were people, they would be scruffy men with good bones.

There’s a certain inevitability about Torres’ approach to art. He could no more avoid painting well-structured spaces than he could have resisted becoming an artist--a move that would have meant defying his father, not to mention turning his back on educational opportunities and art world contacts that many young hopefuls would die for.

The eldest son of Constructivist painter and educator Joaquin Torres Garcia (1874-1949), Augusto Torres was born in 1913, near Barcelona. His parents had immigrated to Spain from Uruguay in 1901, returning to the land of their Catalonian ancestors, but they didn’t stay put. When Augusto was 6, the family traveled to New York; during his youth and adolescence, they lived in Fiesole and Leghorn, Italy; in Villefranche and Paris, France, and in Madrid before they returned in 1934 to their former home in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Predictably, the Paris sojourn was most important to young Torres. Living there throughout his impressionable teen-age years, he became acquainted with such luminaries of modern art as Picasso, Mondrian, Arp, Delaunay, Lipschitz and Severini. While his father was developing theories of Universal Constructivism (merging an international array of ancient and modern symbols with a grid structure), Torres studied with Purist painter and theoretician Amedee Ozenfant in a studio designed by Le Corbusier.

While steeped in the latest developments in modern abstraction, the budding artist also learned about American Indian culture as an employee of the Trocadero Museum. He was given the task of making inventory drawings of Nazca ceramics along with the opportunity to explore the institution’s vast holdings of pre-Columbian and North American Indian art--subjects that were of lasting interest to him and his father.

The Paris years were productive for Joaquin Torres-Garcia, too. With Michel Seuphor, he founded the Constructivist association and periodical “Cercle et Carre” and in 1930 he helped organize an international exhibition of the same name to promote his ideas. An important spokesman for Latin American art, Torres-Garcia also organized the first Paris exhibition on the subject.

Back in Uruguay, Torres-Garcia opened an art school and founded a Constructivist art association and review. Envisioning a new art for the New World, he incorporated pre-Hispanic symbols into pictographic, abstract paintings. His contributions to the development of abstraction and kinetic art in Latin America have been recorded in historical reference books, but his able assistant, Augusto, is little noted.

After Torres-Garcia’s death in 1949, Augusto Torres charted his own direction, a Cubist-inspired abstraction based on real outdoor sights and studio arrangements. Now 75, he has subsequently spent almost 40 years building an oeuvre that is as much the product of a privileged upbringing as of his own vision. The current show, brought to Santa Barbara as part of a “Hispanic Achievement” program, constitutes Torres’ introduction to Southern California.

Unfortunately, the installation of paintings is so scrambled that it’s difficult to track their chronology and many of the drawings are not dated--which doesn’t help the uninitiated. But the muddle isn’t quite as bad as it seems because Torres’ work doesn’t necessarily follow notions of progress. He seems to cycle back on favorite subjects--the tradesmen’s horses he observed in Paris recur over the years, for example--and his palette shifts from brights to muted hues and back again.

His emphasis on structure remains constant, while depictions of space vary. Shallow Cubist space with simultaneous viewpoints presses faceted forms up to the surface. “The Docks,” a 1948 painting, presents a fairly conventional perspective, with ships overlapping each other and smaller buildings in the distance, while “The Abstract World and the Real World” (1962) offers a cropped industrial scene almost completely flattened.

We find table tops tipped up with perspective reversed, along with contradictory reflections in mirrors and quite arbitrary shadows. Some still lifes, such as “Interior With Red Curtain” (1986), contain window-like chunks of deep space and theatrical effects that put us in mind of De Chirico, while “Constructivist Drawing” (presumably influenced by Torres-Garcia) packs a wiry grid with little symbols.

Apart from occasional representational portraits, the range is more apparent than real, however. Torres is not an idea man and he is anything but a free spirit. But neither is he just a designer who hangs images on a formula. Like hundreds of artists before him, he seems endlessly fascinated with re-examining familiar sights and objects because he sees them differently as he readjusts their context.