As a teacher of arts and crafts in a Montessori-style school in Barcelona, Torres-García was captivated by the innate creativity of children, and his first explorations with wood began with a project to manufacture educational toys of interchangeable wooden parts. This project never really proved successful, but in 1924 he produced a small, Cubistic wooden construction, Figure in a Café. Though it would be three years before he produced another such construction, wood would become a significant medium for Torres-García to express his ideas and concerns.
Part of the attraction was the humbleness of wood. As Torres-García developed his aesthetic, he preferred the man-made to the machined, privileging the human and the finite over the absolute and the infinite. As he moved around Europe, he absorbed everything: Cubism, Surrealism, Constructivism, De Stijl and Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism. But all of these various movements and influences are filtered through Torres-García’s lens. Sculptures like Planes of Color (1929), Structure in Primary Colors (1929) and Wood Construction (1934) obviously reference Mondrian’s trademark primary-color grids, which are intended to be understood as expanding into infinity. However, Torres-García’s sculptures are distinctively finite in that they are three-dimensional works having definite boundaries where the planes of color end and the surrounding space begins.
(via Joaquin Torres-García by John Devine | ART LIES: A Contemporary Art Quarterly)