Julio Le Parc: Light for experience

Madrid,

Since the beginning of his career, Julio ever wanted him to assume a definition of art as a produced object that meets characteristics inherited from the past and adds others that are the result of his time or personality of his author: it constitutes for him, before and above any material consideration, a transforming experience of the spectator and the environment in which those works are shown. Fundamental figure of kinetism in Latin America, precursor to the calling relational aesthetics and almost an apostle of the immersion of the public in the creations, this Argentine artist uses simple but reflective materials, lenses and engines to carry out magnetic light facilities in motion.

Born in 1928 in Mendoza and formed with Lucio Fontana, and immersed in the vanguard currents in developing in Buenos Aires, he is being subject to various retrospective samples in recent years in his country and in Europe; The first of his that can be seen in Madrid in the last three decades welcomes her, until April 28, Albarrán Bourdais, a firm that represents it since last January. The exhibition gathers about twenty pieces, between paintings and significant sculptures of their career and new works that continue to respond to their constant participation in kinetism and op art: large format mobile structures, reliefs and pictorial series always articulated articulated always around the form, geometry, light, color, movement and study of its perceptual possibilities.

The permanent analysis of dynamism and the ways in which shades, forms and light could generate it began for the parc, fundamentally, following their transfer to Paris in 1958: in the French capital, together with Horacio García Rossi, Francisco Sobrino, François Morellet, Joël Stein and YVAral, launched the Grav collective Visuel), which advocated the use of those basic resources of plastic creation to approach the viewer, to a broad one: the palette, geometry and perspective games derived from the imbrication of one and the other had, in their opinion, to put themselves at the service of the democratization of the experience of art, of the approach of an audience that had not to require mediation.

They granted an essential value to the intuitive interpretation that would raise that encounter with whom he contemplated: the attention to their public interventions, their optical sculptures and its experiments with color and light should be more playful than intellectual, a then disruptive approach.

Receive the visitor of Albarrán Bourdais the 2013 piece Sphère Bleu Foncéa great a glowing sphere of more than two meters in diameter made with semi -transparent blue fragments that, inevitably, modify our vision of the gallery: it is part of a series of a series of Continue-Mobiles that Le Parc began in the sixties and that encompasses experiments with light boxes and mobile elements. By arranging this type of pieces hanging from the ceiling, they interact with the surrounding light and air, in addition to the movement of the spectators, always much more diverse than before the work on wall: From the experiences (with continuous-mobiles) I obtained the conclusion that the visual result was an always different situation and, nevertheless, it.

Julio Le Parc. In motion. Albarrán Bourdais

Among the canvases present in this exhibition we can highlight Ondes and Série 16Series in which the application of the aforementioned organizational principles of light, geometry and color – limited theirs to fourteen, white, black and gray on the margin – wanted to favor the closest possible connection between work and spectator, far from sweeping towards the field of the cryptic. In both the Parc was used for meticulous correlation systems of soft forms and gradations of color to generate a sensation of movement, for the purpose of illusionism; And in these gradations he worked with instruments such as the airbrush and the spray gun, which allowed him to modulate the surfaces according to his wishes.

Albarrán Bourdais also teaches us past and recent series of its set Alchimiesin which he began working in 1958, when he still lived in Buenos Aires: the latter enter into relation to those he prepared in the eighties; If the latter refer to the alchemical transformation of materials through tubular mechanisms, the latter, dated last year, allude to the immaterial properties of light and movement through apparently infinite multicolored points. Despite its very ordered vertebration, they evoke these works, clearly, cosmic chaos, intertwining in them the stable and what is not.

Among his historical works in Madrid we can also mention a series of black and white paintings that began in that fundamental year of 1958, when in Paris he met Vasarely, precursor of the op art: we talk about grid compositions and geometric shapes made in white, black and gray that would use as a starting point for subsequent methods on the color and the form as generators of dynamism by means sequences and progressions.

As it is easy to glimpse, Le Parc makes use of sketches and models in the investigations that it materializes in paintings and sculptures, and in the gallery we will see some, such as studies for reliefs of the sixties prior to their piece in wood Couleur relief (1973), a modulated surface that he conceived as a trap of light whose real elements are confused with the forms produced by reflexes and shadows. Next to him we will contemplate Torsion 6 (2004), a stainless steel work designed from rods whose endings draw a volume in space, similar to the shape of a tree. The public will have to move to truly appreciate the different modes in which the light affects the satin skin of the piece.

Before the parc, the movement matters inside and the outside.