Sign in with Google
Sign in with email
At Galleria Continua in Paris, industrial interiors give way to a scene replete with candy-like colours—moving, appearing and disappearing within artworks like a magic trick in a new exhibition, L’Euphorie de la Couleur. It celebrates the work of Franco-Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923 - 2019), who created a new language of contemporary art by rethinking one of its most fundamental elements—colour. Cruz-Diez shaped the Kinetic and Op art movements through his experiments with colour and light.
Walking through the exhibition running from June 07 - September 14, 2024, reveals a world that is wild, fleeting and infinitely mutable. It showcases the wide range of techniques pioneered by Cruz-Diez in his pursuit of liberating colour from form. Under his ever-experimenting hand, colour was no longer a static medium or tool, but the artwork itself.
Juxtaposed artworks with intersecting, blurred-hued lines create an effect of movement and conversation between the colours throughout the art gallery in France. The lack of fixity within the art exhibition creates an almost hypnotic effect using little more than lights, coloured transparent strips and the viewers' gaze.
L’Euphorie de la Couleur begins where Cruz-Diez did in his experimentation: with works from his Physichromie (1959) series. A structure formed by vertical coloured frames becomes a light trap of sorts, allowing each colour to transform the other and the structure as a whole in their interplay. As light passes through and the viewer’s gaze shifts, through the additive, subtractive and reflective properties of colour, so does the artwork. Colour comes alive, no longer pigments on a flat canvas, but appearing seemingly from thin air.
In Couleur Additive (1959), planes of colour intersect to create new shades which are physically absent from the artwork itself. The overlapping of coloured planes is a recurring motif in Cruz-Diez's work. The brightly coloured, transparent columns in Transchromies (1965) are distanced, overlapped and lit carefully. As the viewer ‘sees through’ the colours, areas of intersection become areas of synthesis.
After all, as in nature, colour exists in relation to its surroundings rather than in isolation, in paint tubes or hexadecimal codes. It is this isolation that Cruz-Diez sought to interrupt, turning to the works of Newton and Goethe, among others, to build a philosophy of colour that reflected its ephemeral and impressionable nature.
In works from his series Inductions Chromatiques (1963), Cruz-Diez uses the properties of the retina to create art that is simultaneously physical and virtual. When one looks at a colour long enough, an ‘after image’ of its complementary colour is left on the retina. Using complex patterns of coloured stripes, the contemporary artist allows the viewer to see the image and ‘after image’ together. Colours like ‘inductive yellow’ are formed by superimposing blue, black and white in a seemingly impossible feat.
In this way, Cruz-Diez’s works become a collaboration between the artist and viewer—they are never static, and only ‘completed’ when experienced. Walking by works from his Chromointerference (1964) series is a testament to this. A blurring effect is created by overlaying colours on each other using transparent panels or projections. Colours are mixed not on a palette or canvas, but as wavelengths of light intercept and affect each other. Using this subtractive property of colour, Cruz-Diez uses only a few colours but allows viewers to see a whole spectrum.
This is further modulated by the viewer’s distance from the piece and the viewing angle. The power of this effect is seen in the Pyramide Chromointerférente (2007) where the shifting colour patterns seem to transfigure even solid objects they are projected onto.
The many technical innovations that marked Cruz-Diez’s career were necessary for his goal of inventing a new discourse of art. He sought a language that would be unencumbered by the responsibility to narrate, record and represent humans and their environments, or carry the weight of their history. In the immaterial, shifting world of colours, he found it.
The lively artworks showcased at L’Euphorie de la Couleur demand presence and presentness. They exist, are created, destroyed and transformed by the viewer’s gaze, beholden entirely to the present moment. They demonstrate the immateriality and unpredictability of the seemingly known and familiar. In a world where the classic and timeless are lauded, Cruz-Diez’s celebration of the temporary, changing and transmutable becomes euphoric.
Carlos Cruz-Diez’s ‘L’Euphorie de la Couleur’ is on view from June 07 - September 14, 2024, at Galleria Continua Paris.
(Text by Srishti Ojha, intern at STIR)
What do you think?