Carlos Cruz-Diez

He made us see and experience colour as a pure and sensuous pleasure; a participatory, interactive experience open to everyone, regardless of age, class, culture or social standing.”

Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923 - 2019) was a major protagonist in the field of Kinetic and Optical Art, a movement that encourages “an awareness of the instability of reality”, his body of work established him as one of the key 20th century thinkers in the realm of colour. Rigorously theoretical yet exuberantly experiential, his works challenge viewers to appreciate colour as “a reality which acts on the human being with the same intensity as cold, heat, sound, and so on.”

Carlos Eduardo Cruz-Diez was born in Caracas on August 17th 1923, to Mariana Adelaida Diez de Cruz and Carlos Eduardo Cruz-Lander, during the latter years of the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez’s long rule. Cruz-Diez spoke of his father as a poet and intellectual who made his living at a soft-drink factory; both parents, he said, were supportive of his art career. Cruz-Diez was attuned to phenomena of colour and light early on; in the catalogue for his retrospective in America he said that at age nine he was transfixed by the red projections on his white shirt caused by sunlight streaming through cola bottles at his father’s plant.

He attended the School of Visual Arts and Applied Arts in Caracas, where he befriended Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto, who would become his peers in geometric abstraction and the Op and Kinetic Art movements, respectively. A successful design career in Caracas followed. Cruz-Diez was artistic director of the Caracas branch of the advertising firm McCann-Erickson from 1946 to 1951 while he continued to paint in his spare time.

As an artist he was restless, however, finding himself increasingly dissatisfied with the social realist paintings of shanty towns he had been making - “paintings that depicted poverty and social problems (which I couldn’t solve) for rich people to collect.” He turned to making abstract sculptures and paintings with movable parts that could be manipulated by the public. Cruz-Diez was increasingly drawn to abstraction and to the idea of developing his own movement or language, as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian had done. But that seemed impossible in Venezuela, which was under another military dictatorship, that of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. “Amid the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez, the artist or intellectual had no reception at all. We’d be at a party and all of a sudden a military would show up and we would have to flee like flies.”

In 1954, he and his wife uprooted their young family and followed Otero, Soto and other school friends to Europe, setting up a base in the Catalonian town of El Masnou, near Barcelona. He made frequent trips to Paris, where in 1955 he was struck by a group show of Kinetic Art, “Le Mouvement,” at Denise René. It included works by Soto, Victor Vasarely and Jean Tinguely. Inspired and “full of hope, sketches and projects,” he made a brief return to Caracas, where he opened a graphic arts workshop and kept refining his abstraction, completing his first Physichromie in 1959.

The term Physichromie was a term invented by Cruz-Diez to communicate his combined intention for the works. On the one hand, the works explore the physical effects of colour on the viewer. On the other hand, they encourage the viewer to experience colour or ‘chroma’ as unfolding and continually changing, much as colour is experienced in nature. But he felt misunderstood by an art world that was still enamoured with figuration. Building on chromatic experiments by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionists and the artist and educator Josef Albers, among others, Cruz-Diez devised relief paintings of multicoloured cardboard or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate as the viewer moves past them.

Physichromie No. 113 is a square bas relief. The work is comprised of a sequence of thin vertical coloured bands and fine raised polished stainless-steel plates that repeat themselves with mathematical regularity across the surface of the work. Positioned slightly below the mid-point of the composition is a large floating circle. Like the background, the circle is composed of thin alternating vertical coloured bands and polished steel plates, but it is rendered in a contrasting colour palette. The work is designed to be viewed from multiple angles. Depending on the viewer’s position in relation to the work, the colour across its surface alters radically, transforming from one chromatic range to another as the viewer moves in front of it.

The Physichromies are a light trap, a space where a series of colour strips interact and transform one another. They generate new ranges of colour and invade the space that surrounds the vertical bands that cover the entire work. Moreover, the movement of the viewer and the light source create a series of chromatic variations, similar to those produced in a real landscape with each revolution of the sun. They will never be exactly the same because the intensity and nature of the light that is shed upon them will never be the same. Hence the name Physichromies, because they put into play the colour of light, a physical colour.

The artist originally made Physichromie No. 113 in 1963 using a combination of cardboard strips with coloured edges and thinly sliced slats of a fragile reflective material called lumaline. However, the lumaline deteriorated over time, prompting the artist to begin remaking the entire Physichromie series in 1976. The reconstructed Physichromie No. 113 of 1976 is made of more durable inverted U-shaped pieces of aluminium, prepared with a coat of priming and a coat of white acrylic paint. The coloured bands are screen-printed with matt inks and the mirror-struts interpolated between them are stainless steel, polished on both sides.

By 1960 Cruz-Diez had settled permanently in Paris, where he experienced a “creative euphoria” of competing movements, including Arte Povera, Pop Art and Fluxus as well as Op and Kinetic Art. A few of these “Physichromies”, were included in many exhibitions of Op Art and Kinetic Art, including MoMA’s movement-defining but critically lambasted group show “The Responsive Eye” in 1965. Soon he was in demand right across Europe, part of a group of artists changing art from something static into something that people could participate in. His signature works are labyrinths of coloured light that he called “Chromosaturations,” which plunge participants into a series of intense, stimulating and sometimes destabilizing “chromatic situations,” as he called them. The Chromosaturation is an artificial environment composed of three colour chambers, one red, one green and one blue that immerse the visitor in a completely monochrome situation. This experience creates disturbances in the retina, accustomed to receiving wide range of colours simultaneously. The Chromosaturation can act as a trigger, activating in the viewer the notion of colour as a material or physical situation. This was a natural progression from the Physichromie series that Cruz-Diez had started six years earlier.

The longer you stay in the room the more your eyes try - unsuccessfully - to adjust to the unusual circumstance; dimming the colour of the chamber you are in and intensifying the gradient of the three colours mixing together in the other two chambers. Some rooms contain objects such as rectangular prisms or suspended cubes where each side is bathed in reflected colour, best showcasing the vibrancy of an environment entirely free of form and meaning. People, like objects, become one with the work.

Slowly but surely Cruz-Diez attracted attention and then critical acclaim. The following year from the infamous “The Responsive Eye” show he exhibited Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, in the 1966 Kinetic Art survey “Bewogen Beweging.” He had been awarded the International Prize for Painting at the São Paulo Biennale of 1967. And he had represented Venezuela at the 1970 Venice Biennale. In Paris for a street festival in 1969 Cruz-Diez created his first public artwork. It was temporary and consisted of 20 tinted-Plexiglass cubicles that occupied the pedestrianised Boulevard Saint-Germain.

In 1974 Cruz-Diez painted red, orange, green and black stripes across the walls and floor of the main terminal at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Caracas, a pattern he returned to in 2014 for a commission to decorate a boat, the Dazzle Ship, in the manner of camouflage in Liverpool’s dockyard as part of the city’s biennial. The Caracas airport commission was followed by dozens more however, including a sculpture for the square outside the Venezuelan embassy in Paris, as well as interventions in the UBS headquarters in Zurich in 1975, a hydroelectric plant in Venezuela in 1977, a sculpture marking Andorra’s border with Spain in 1991 and the decoration of the paths leading to the Marlins baseball stadium in Miami in 2011.

Cruz-Diez’s interest in “launching colour into space,” as he once wrote, and his desire to create accessible interactive environments, have influenced many younger artists, like Olafur Eliasson, Tauba Auerbach and Ivan Navarro. In a biographical video on his foundation’s website, Cruz-Diez said: “I don’t make paintings, nor sculptures. I make platforms for occurrences. They are platforms where colour is being produced, dissolved, generated in a perpetual instant. In it there’s no notion of past nor future. In it is the notion of the present moment, just like life.”

Having chosen directors vision 4 I believe the influences from Cruz-Diez's interactive environments are perfectly suited to the atmosphere I am hoping to create. As I am looking to portray a psychological journey it is imperative that I consider all the senses and what triggers them, turning the experience for the audience into something more than just a visual. A strong use of colour and light will appear throughout my set, creating an immersive experience for the actors and audience. Zones of the set will be illuminated differently to represent the way Don Jose feels in each scene.