Carlos Cruz-Diez. El color haciéndose

The exhibition Carlos Cruz-Diez. El color haciéndose (Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color on the Make) had 2,000 visitors on its inaugural day, Sunday June 23. This was a record for Panama's Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC). As I write, five weeks later, the number of visitors has risen to 25,000. On view at the museum through August 18, 2019 and presented as a retrospective journey, El color haciéndose spotlights—via what the MAC identified as "five artistic experiences"—the versatility that distinguished Cruz-Diez throughout his career. With the support of graphic and audiovisual complementary information, the conceptual basis that governed Cruz-Diez's work and his foundational interest in color are outlined from the start of the exhibition plan. In that way we had access to his origins, to the very essence of explorations that go well beyond the mere artistic event. We witness, for example, the way in which the Physichromies (one of Cruz-Diez's earliest lines of investigation, begun in 1959) evolved alongside the materials and technologies the artist had access to: the initial cardboard shapes were later simplified into thin plastic lines, and later their boundaries expanded with materials like aluminum. During one of the visits organized by the MAC as part of its program of pubic activities, Gabriel Cruz1 revealed that Cruz-Diez saw his own oeuvre as "a succession of failures" constantly being overwritten. As he broke through each of these trials and found solutions for his technical dilemmas, Cruz-Diez came ever closer to his goal: the autonomy of color, independent of shape. On exhibit in another gallery were "recent works" created in the Articruz studio (established in Panama City a decade ago). These majestic artworks probed the boundaries of the artist's usual territory and demonstrated his current level of technical mastery. Moving forward each on its own path to refine investigations like the Couleur Additive (Additive color) and Couleur a l'Espace (Color in Space), they were able to destabilize with increasing effectiveness the certitudes of the human eye. The exhibition also includes, to great effect, a number of immersive installations that intensify direct experience, interaction in its purest state. It is indeed with one of Cruz-Diez's Chromosaturations that the exhibition comes to a close: an environment where primary colors occupy all available light, allowing viewers to observe, for a fraction of a second, the formation of color as it comes to be in space. Carlos Cruz-Diez died in Paris on July 27, at the age of 95, surrounded by family and friends and having witnessed his own entry in the annals of art. El color haciéndose was Cruz-Diez's last solo exhibition, and it offers irrefutable proof not only of the transcendent quality and the contemporariness of his work, but also of how indispensable art is if we are to understand, even a little better, our place in the world.
1 Director of the Cruz-Diez Foundation, advisor to the Articruz Studio, and Carlos Cruz-Diez's grandson