La Biennale Paris, in partnership with La Patinoire Royale – Galerie Valérie Bach, will present “Transchromie”, a significant work by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz Diez.
This work reflects the artist’s desire to experience all the theories and practices of colour
This monumental and immersive artwork will be the centerpiece in the contemporary sector of the fair. The work was previously introduced in Brussels, and now for the first time in Paris in its original format 15 x 15m. It will be installed at the foot of the paddock of the Grand Palais’ nave. Conceived in 1965 for the Galerie Denise René, “Transchromie” is a monumental environment, a vital experience of colour, which represents an essential landmark of the artist’s career.
Visitor to the fair are immediately immersed in this large installation, which allows them to experience the extreme “sensorial action of colour. The experience immerses the whole body of the visitor and is enriched as the external environment interacts with the reflection and illumination of the piece. “Though the colour”, “Transchromie” invites the visitor to penetrate colour, based on nine different shades ingeniously distributed by the artist in twenty-five pairs of right-angled slats.
By juxtaposing these coloured and transparent panels on a white, immaculate and reflexive surface over 200 square meters, the late artist invites the visitor to stroll inside the colour and to create by his progression and the addition of colours and entirely individual chromatic experience.
This work represents the artist’s desire to experience all the theories and practices that he has conceived and defended throughout his life and his prolific career. Like his fellow artists Jesus Rafael Soto and Julio Le Parc, founders of kinetic and optical art, Carlos Cruz-Diez conceives the artwork as a participatory work.
Carlos Cruz-Diez considers that this work is the sum of the object and the subject in a delimited zone, in all the variability of the individual experiences. This is why he has been encouraging interventions in public places since the beginning of his career, with a supposed goal of democratizing the art object. Art belongs to everyone and everyone experiences it.
His research on colour is based on a scientific and empirical stance on sensory and physical experience. The artwork is no longer autonomous and distant. It is no longer a single proposition of the artist to the public. Public and artists are indissolubly associated in his phenomenology, constituting in a way a supposed couple, by which the artist takes an amused and quasi-scientific distance on the effect produced on the spectator.
Like Soto and his “Pénétrables”, or Le Parc and his “Continues lumière”, Carlos Cruz-Diez summons the subject at the heart of his work, asking him to envision it through personal experience.
The “Labyrinth de Transchromie” is an invitation to discover this individual experience, as a generous and enriching desire to share what the artist has imagined during his career.
This labyrinth is not one. It opens long diagonal perspectives, straight lines to the outer space. Thus, this labyrinth does not close. It is a place of convergence and encounter for humanity in search of meaning and openness, which communicates in colour and shares its sensations.
How could we not see in the work of Carlos Cruz-Diez and in this “Transchromie” a direct connection with the great tradition of Western stained glass, a will to use light and color to escape from the obscure cave of a materialist era by craving for openness and tolerance, a will to reach justice and beauty ?
To enter into colour, as a free being, as if the colour were an airlock, and to leave it mentally and spiritually transformed … Is not this, for an artist, one of the most generous proposals and monumental made to an audience that Carlos Cruz-Diez never stopped to enchant and surprise.
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Bahrain will be the guest of honour at La Biennale Paris 2019. The fair teams up with ArtBAB and Art Bahrain Across Borders, Mathias Ary Jan, President of SNA and Kaneka Subberwal, ArtBAB fair director The Grand Palais will be hosting a pavilion dedicated mainly to contemporary art but also to the heritage of this Gulf country.
La Biennale Paris – 13-17 September – Grand Palais – Main entrance Avenue Winston Churchill – 75008 Paris – France