The chromatic research of Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Díez is now being shown at the museum managed by the Fundación Juan March in Majorca
Carlos Cruz-Diez, 1987
From July 17 to November 15, 2009, at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español Fundación Juan March in Cuenca
Curator: Osbel Suárez
Works: 20
“Since I began my adventure as a painter, I have developed a profound affection for color.
I believed that every stroke laid on canvas by the brush was an affective message of great importance and a testimony that could not wait to be shared. I have insisted on making color an experience, with an affective impact that overshadows all other artifices in the act of painting”. With these words, the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Díez explains the motivation behind his ceaseless chromatic research over the past fifty years, experiments that have made him one of the most prominent figures of the contemporary kinetic movement.
20 of the works that bear witness to that laborious work, created after 1954, are now on display at the Fundación Juan March Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in what will constitute the first exhibition in Spain dedicated exclusively to Cruz-Díez. Some were produced during the painters sojourn in the Catalonian town of Masnou, where he lived before moving to Paris. These pieces, on loan from the artists personal collection and those of the Fundación Allegro, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée dArt Moderne in Paris and the MUBAG in Alicante, attempt to give new meaning to our traditional conception of color, which the Venezuelan creator treats as entirely self-sufficient and unconnected to form. In the series Fisionomías (Physiognomies), Cromosaturaciones (Chromosaturations), Transcromías (Transcromies) and Inducciones cromáticas (Chromatic Inductions), tonalities become elements that are independent of the pictorial whole. Colors are endowed with both physical and sensible value, capable of being in constant transformation and even mutation, and of stimulating our way of perceiving reality and its shifting, ephemeral facet that is so characteristic of our contemporary times. Cruz-Díez sees color as the expression of ambiguity, instability, myths and affects in painting.
To accompany this exhibition, which has traveled here from Majorca, an extensive catalogue has been published that includes an interview with the artist. A new re-edited and expanded edition of the book Reflection on Colour, first published by Cruz-Díez in 1989, has also been released for the occasion. In addition, a course will be offered starting on March 5 entitled From the representation to the creation of movement, where experts such as Merce Gambús, Javier Arnaldo and Teresa Lanceta will analyze the evolution of the kinetic movement.
Carlos Cruz-Diez
Fisicromía, 1963
Carlos Cruz-Diez
Color aditivo, 1964
