A cor no espaço no tempo - Carlos Cruz-Diez
The Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo presents, from July 14 through September 23, a large-scale Carlos Cruz-Diez retrospective titled A cor no espaço no tempo ("Color in Space and Time"). The exhibition features nearly 150 works, including paintings, prints, chromatic environments, drawings, and videos. For 50 years, Cruz-Diez devoted himself to researching the origins of optics, color, and light, and produced an extensive, wide-ranging oeuvre of great historical importance for Latin America's early abstract avant-garde. Throughout his career, Cruz-Diez has created varied works such as color structures rather unconventional for their time, light environments, public-space interventions, projects in integrative architecture and experimental works exploring human visual perception, always insisting on the participative character of color.
This exhibition traces the course of the artist's career from the figurative paintings of his student years (1940s)—unknown to many—through his most recent color-in-motion experiments (2000). Among the works on exhibit are the series Colores físicos, which consists of a sequence of vertically aligned color lines and spotlight filters modified according to the angle of the ambient light and the position of the observer to create effects that evolve continuously, depending on how the viewer moves. Also featured will be more than 50 Fisicromías, presenting the eight phases of the development of that series, from the hand-painted wood with pieces of cardboard to the use of aluminum bands and digital printing technology. The extensive retrospective will also include works of spatial intervention, such as Transcromía (1965-2010), which consists of sets of knives organized in the four sections of the hallways at the entrance to the exhibition.
Besides occupying a large section of the museum, the show will also present Cruz-Diez's architectural projects and interventions in the urban scene, by means of videos and other registers. Works like his intervention on pedestrian walkways inside hydro-electric plants will be on view for the public as the exhibition's closing act.
Cruz-Diez approaches color in a scientific, perceptive way. Color is not a pigment deposited on a solid surface, it is not a material, but a situation "resulting" from the projection of light on objects and the way in which this projection is processed by the human eye. His fascination with this phenomenological process is what accounts for the abundance of his oeuvre and the path followed by his career.
