Joaquín Torres-García

(Montevideo, 1874 – 1949)

Still Life with Oil Lamp

1943

oil on cardboard mounted on canvas

52.5 x 80 cm

Inv. no. CX00048

BBVA Collection Spain



Joaquín Torres-García is a key figure in twentieth century avant-garde art, both in Europe and Latin America. Inventor of a highly innovative language, impossible to classify in one single style, his practice assimilated lessons learned from the main movements of his time. In this context, his works move between the postulates of
and Neo-Plasticism, to which he applied an innovative interpretation grounded in a combination of abstract and figurative concepts. Through his work Torres-García aspired to the creation of a universal art which he simplified geometrically without relinquishing a schematic representation of his surrounding reality.

Still lifes played a very important role in his production. From his early days as an artist in 1892 in Barcelona to his final period in Uruguay, Torres-García created over two hundred paintings that could be classified as still lifes. The early ones respond to a naturalistic and classical view of figurative painting. During the 1920s, in tune with the trends of synthetic
, the appearance of the depicted objects began to decompose, the details disappear and the space deconstructed. It was in the 1930s when his compositions were fragmented into grids of vertical and horizontal lines, to which he incorporated frontal simplified drawings of elements like fruit bowls, glasses, bottles, cups and food. In 1940 he began to abandon this particular form of compartmentalisation, as borne out by Still Life with Oil Lamp, where we notice a return to the representation of a three-dimensional space, but without renouncing a high degree of purity and formal schematisation.

This work speaks to Torres-García’s abiding interest in cubist creations, from which he borrows the reduction of profiles and the use of neutral tones. The group of objects, including a book and an oil lamp, has been arranged in various planes of colour following orthogonal geometry. The work boasts exceptional compositional quality and is a good example of the painter’s final period, expressing the prevalence in his work of formal aspects over colour-related concerns.