Colour as a line to follow. Colour as emotional power. Colour as linguistic reasoning. Without bars, without symbols, devoid of aestheticism, colour is and can be no more than essence, a phenomenological material potential. In space and time, colour is mental perception, figurative encounter, spiritual trace. To speak with it is to enter into symbiosis with the instability of reality, a synaesthetic change free from an improperly objective vision
Carlos Cruz-Diez, Induction Chromatique Walkway, 2019, cromografia su vinile, 27 x 3 m, San Gimignano 2023, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. © Carlos Cruz-Diez _ Bridgeman Images, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
Thoughts, reflections, actions: all this is the world of Carlos Cruz-Diez – a Franco-Venezuelan artist born in 1923 and died in 2019 – who made chromatism his field of excellence, his source of scientism, his perpetual life. A kinetic and optical art style, concentrating his perceptive investigation of colour not as a compositional element but as a real happening. His works attract in a sensory experience in which time and space are amplified, dilated in the environment. The individual works determine the presence and absence of elements: the radiant colour creates an atmosphere that varies with the intensity and position of the light, with the position and distance of the viewer, on the theoretical basis of three conditions, the subtractive, the additive and the reflex.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, L’Euforia del Colore, exhibition view Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2023, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. © Carlos Cruz-Diez _ Bridgeman Images, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
Thoughts, reflections, actions: all this is the world of Carlos Cruz-Diez – a Franco-Venezuelan artist born in 1923 and died in 2019 – who made chromatism his field of excellence, his source of scientism, his perpetual life. A kinetic and optical art style, concentrating his perceptive investigation of colour not as a compositional element but as a real happening. His works attract in a sensory experience in which time and space are amplified, dilated in the environment. The individual works determine the presence and absence of elements: the radiant colour creates an atmosphere that varies with the intensity and position of the light, with the position and distance of the viewer, on the theoretical basis of three conditions, the subtractive, the additive and the reflex.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, L’Euforia del Colore, exhibition view Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2023, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. © Carlos Cruz-Diez _ Bridgeman Images, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
For the hundredth anniversary of his birth, for the first time in Via del Castello in San Gimignano, Galleria Continua celebrates the artist with a solo exhibition entitled L’euforia del colore, presenting the most significant works of his long career, accompanying all his theories with archive documentation. In the large room of the former theatre/cinema there is Environnement Chromointerférent, a participatory work belonging to the Chromointerférence research. Here colour enters into “conflict” with the presence of the spectator, it is ambiguous, relational, diversified, it appears and disappears, modifying the environment. Cruz-Diez plays with perceptual instability by considering the movement variable but the shadow that a body generates by interrupting the colour flow to be constant. Works belonging to the Physichromie theory capture light (artificial within the gallery) and, depending on the type of colour used, create new colour variations that are projected into space and also change with the viewer. Singularly, the colour generated is not present in the work, but by subtraction, addition or reflection it comes to life.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, Environnement de Transchromie circulaire, 1965-2017, colored glass on a stainless steel structure, 260 x 580 cm, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © Carlos Cruz-Diez _ Bridgeman Images, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
The work Environnement de Transchromie Circulaire – which closes the exhibition and belongs to the Transchromie research – is a circular structure placed in the outdoor garden that once again focuses on active and passive participation, on chromatic immersion by natural light, and the subtraction of colour by transforming the surrounding reality. This outdoor installation is followed by another one placed in Piazza delle Erbe in the historical heart of San Gimignano. In the wake of the importance of public art for Galleria Continua, a work from the Induction Chromatique cycle was created here for the exhibition occasion. The artist’s idea is to distort the everyday place by giving it an aesthetic and synaesthetic experience: kinetic art is in the presence of the urban.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, Environnement Chromointerférent 1974-2016, video projection, variable dimensions, 2023, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. © Carlos Cruz-Diez _ Bridgeman Images, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
Carlos Cruz-Diez’s works can be seen as a cross between painting and sculpture: the eye or body movement of the viewer allows the luminous dynamism of the colour to be grasped and its expression to be grasped, in the present moment and entirely personal.
Info:
Carlos Cruz-Diez. L’euforia del colore
27/05 – 10/09 2023
Galleria Continua
Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano (SI)
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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