Luis Tomasello

The Latin American art world has lost one of its key figures, last January 30th, at the age of 98, Luis Tomasello died in Paris, where he had lived since 1957. There he will rest in the immortality of his genius. My direct contact with his work began in the late 1960s. Having won a scholarship from the French government for work towards my doctoral thesis in Paris, it was easy to see that the most advantageous topic for a Latin American researcher was kinetic art, since its most powerful group of practitioners was centered in the French capital and came, mostly, from Latin America. In the Lumière et mouvement show curated by Frank Popper at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1967, intended as an assessment of the expansion of kinetic art, more than 30% of the artists on exhibit were Latin American, including Tomasello, Soto, Cruz Diez, Le Parc, Vardanega, and Martha Boto; they all lived in Paris and benefited from important stimuli, such as the support of Denise René, in whose gallery they found a prestigious exhibition space. It was my privilege to be able to go to the sources, establishing direct contact with the main practitioners of kinetic art. Also, in the case Tomasello I enjoyed the benefit of friendship, and our closeness allowed me to understand the importance—often the motive for his works—of his friendship with the painter and sculpture Julio Silva and with writers such as Julio Cortázar and Saúl Yurkievich. With Cortázar, an inspiring "partnership in crime" developed, enriched year after year by the shared summers in Saignon, in Southern France. From that partnership resulted two art books: Un elogio del tres (1980) and Negro y el 10 (1984), in which the writer commented on the artist's ideas. Referring to the bitter honor of designing a tomb for his friend, Tomasello said: "I made him his last little house." When Carol Dunlop, Cortázar's companion, died in 1982, the writer was already sick and asked Tomasello to design a site for the couple to have their final rest. The result is a two-page open book, in marble, that can be visited today in the Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris. "What remains of a man," Paul Valery said, "is what his name brings to mind." What does the name "Tomasello" bring to mind? I would say that the highest level of poetry ever reached by lumino-kinetic art. Rather than the vertiginous acceleration that marks the work of many of his colleagues, he helped us experience the admirable tremor of time as it emerges from the play of color-light that discreetly appears and disappears on the surface of the plane. Art historians will say that one of the greatest contributions made by Tomasello's lumino-kinetic works was what he deemed the "color-sensation," a discovery he materialized in his Atmósferas cromoplásticas. The "color-sensation," on which Tomasello worked insistently since the late 1950s, arises from coloring the facets of geometric shapes (particularly white cubes) that are hidden from frontal view; in this way, color reflects on the support in a kind or aura that shifts with the viewer's motion and the varying incidence of natural or artificial light. Given that his reliefs are projected as light into the bi-dimensionality of the plane, Tomasello thought of himself as a painter more than as a sculptor. It is not surprising that, in his European study journey begun in 1951, this painter of light felt the impact of both Mondrian's oeuvre and the Chartres Cathedral, where he was able to imagine an aesthetics of light that today is also part of the public space, thanks to his contributions. Since the 1980s, Tomasello's reliefs give dynamism to inner and outer walls in ...