A reading of latin american avant-garde through the decolonial lense: Alejandro Xul Solar and Joaquín Torres-García, from the ineluctable modern eurocentrism to the search for a communication "other"

Abstract

This dissertation revisits modern art in Latin America. The paradoxes of the Latin American avant-garde discourse, which uses modern ideals in order to create a culturally decolonised identity freed from Eurocentrism, are confronted to the theory defended by the decolonial thinking according to which coloniality is inherent to modernity. Through the examination of the texts and paintings of Alejandro Xul Solar and Joaquín Torres-García, two artists who participated in the renewal of the vanguard scenes of Argentina and Uruguay between the 1920s and the 1940s, my aim is to understand whether modern art is – as decolonial thinkers imply – doomed to reproduce coloniality, or if it can conversely allow to undermine it. The analysis of their works first shows their discourses as entrenched in a narrative of modernity that indeed proves to be a fallacious mirror of coloniality. The focus on abstraction and on the thinking and communicating ‘other’ it produces, nevertheless leads me to question the decolonial premise. I finally conclude that the aesthetic freedom brought by the avant-garde allowed Solar and Torres-García to, in some cases, avoid reproducing coloniality, but does however not make them decolonial artists.