ÉDITIONS : CARLOS CRUZ-DIEZ

Éditions brings together a selection of bidimensional works by Carlos Cruz-Diez. Cruz-Diez is renowned as an innovator of Op Art and Kinetic Art who revolutionized the experience and perception of color. With the obsessive questioning of a technician and employing a rationalist, nearly scientific approach, he experimented with color combinations to see what the various permutations and harmonies could evoke. 

While he is well known for his participatory environments and three dimensional works, he also produced works that lay flat on the page. 

In a 2012 interview, Carlos Cruz-Diez expressed that while in art history “painting on a flat surface became synonymous with permanence and eternity”, in his works he attempted to rupture with this stasis to instead create a “chromatic event” in which the work is altered in relation to the viewer’s position, motion, and movement through time and space. “My challenge is to reveal to the viewer a reality without a past or a future: my works exist in a perpetual present,” the artist said in 2019.

When he chose to work in series it was an intentional exploration of the declension of colors. He programmed systematic sets in an experimental game exploring the virtual sensations produced in the vision of the viewer. The serial works presented in the exhibition range from early works on paper such as the silkscreens Couleur Additive série de 2 (1981) in ochre and orange and the Induction Chromatique series (1988) to later large scale works such as the chromography on aluminum set of Couleur Additive Denise (2007). In Couleur Additive série semana (2013), Cruz-Diez used lithography to create a graphic set of prints with geometric shapes corresponding to the days of the week. 

The Induction Chromatique works are part of one of Cruz-Diez’s eight long term ongoing investigations into the properties of color. This series works with retinal persistence, which is the phenomena in which the opposite corresponding color imprints in the eye after staring at a primary color. While the experience of retinal persistence usually occurs sequentially — such as seeing a virtual sensation of green after staring at red pigment — the Induction Chromatique stabilizes the phenomena into a single experience contained in the work. 

His Couleur Additive series meanwhile works with the radiation of color. When one color plane touches another, a darker vertical line appears at the point of contact. While this line is not physically painted into the work, it is a regular event that occurs in the perception of the viewer. In this series Cruz-Diez worked with this visual evocation of in fact invisible colors, making real the viewer’s experience of colors that are not physically present in the work. For the artist, “Color is not on the surface, color is in space.”