Interior con ventana al mar [Interior with Window Looking to the Sea]

As the son of the great modernist artist Joaquín Torres-García, Augusto Torres was exposed to art from a very young age. His father was a compulsive teacher, writer, and philosopher, so it is perhaps not surprising that he and his brother, Horacio, became significant artists in their own right. Through his father, Augusto Torres saw the most current avant-garde European art, but also the primitive art exhibited at the time in many European museums and galleries. Interior con ventana al mar is an excellent example of his still-lifes, compositions in which the gridlike structure both complements and complicates the rendering of the objects in the painting. Indeed, in some sections of the painting, it is difficult to pick out the precise object being reproduced. The overlapping planes create multiple perspectives, as though we were viewing the scene through a series of mirrors. For Torres abstraction and realism were not two opposed ideas, and this painting suggests how both can be present within a single poetic and suggestive work.