In "La orientación conveniente al arte y a la cultura de América" ("The Right Course for Art and Culture from the Americas"), Uruguayan artist and theorist Joaquín Torres-García articulates a strategy by which Latin American art can be distinguished from European artistic traditions and trends while addressing what he considers to be the universal questions in art. He also asserts that although certain artistic inclinations and themes are distinctive to the period in which they are developed, their materialization varies throughout the world, and that South America has its own artistic culture and could serve as the cradle of new artistic movements or preoccupations. He also contends that although Latin American art has been mostly derivative of European art, Latin American artists possess the ability to distinguish their work by concentrating on eternal and universal concepts of form and structure in art, and by eschewing any particular artistic tradition in order to address broader themes of humanity. The formal characteristics that Torres-García believes must be reflected in art are proportion, order, function of elements, a pure concept of form, and rhythm. He explains that his Taller Torres-García (workshop) in Montevideo was established to serve as a laboratory for artistic experimentation that combines the fine and applied arts. It is important, according to him, that Latin American artists question the lack of an independent South American artistic style, and begin to move towards its development. However, Torres-García also insists that artists must examine current issues in art, such as the tension between pure formal experimentation, and the treatment of social problems through art.

Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) was a Uruguayan artist and theorist born to a Catalonian father and a Uruguayan mother. In 1892, Torres-García’s family returned from Uruguay to Catalonia, where he lived and worked as a painter until the 1920s, when he moved to New York and became a toy maker. Two years later he returned to Europe and by 1926, he had met Piet Mondrian in Paris, and became involved with the Constructivist Cercle et Carré exhibition. In 1932, Torres García moved to Madrid where he developed an interest in the grid, which later became his most recognizable pictorial device. When Torres-García returned to Uruguay in 1934, he founded the Asociación de Arte Constructivo, and began publishing the magazines, Círculo y cuadrado and Removedor. Torres-García gave hundreds of lectures and conferences in Uruguay, and ran a workshop frequented by his followers, including his sons, Augusto Torres and Horacio Torres, and Julio Alpuy, Gonzalo Fonseca, Manuel Pailós, José Gurvich, and Francisco Matto. His own paintings combined the grid and geometry associated with European Constructivism with a softer, more painterly line. Additionally, his use of the grid in his Cosmic Monument (1938) in Montevideo referenced the rectangular grid forms of Latin American architecture, such as the Incan stonework in Cusco. In 1944 Torres-García published the book Universalismo constructivo [Constructive Universalism], which outlines his concept of a uniquely South American Constructivist style. In “La orientación conveniente al arte y a la cultura de América" he addresses the need to formulate an artistic practice in South America that is concurrently universal and independent. He also cites his Studio of the South in Montevideo as the ideal space for the development of this new South American artistic practice.