video
Edition: José Antonio Simón
Over 50 decades, Carlos Cruz Diez (1923) has worked the origins and optical color. The body of his work integrates the participation of the observer while insisting on the nature of color. In an exhibition organized by the MFAH and the foundation Cruz-Diez in the spring of 2011 I had the opportunity to interview for the second time the Master Carlos Cruz Diez.
Rose Mary Salum: As a painter committed why leaves you to address the reality of your country?
Carlos Cruz Diez: I thought that a painting could circumstance change. It was a big mistake because social problems are circumstantial, the problems of art are permanent, eternal. Is a superstructure of society, and politics, is circumstantial. That was influenced by the Marxist movement and his stand against the history of the revolution. In Venezuela there were many artists who made socialist realism. But I decided to tell the poor are poor not solve your problem. I paint I can not give a solution, I panic, it bothers me. Nor could solve through painting that people live well. I am an artist, and I will not do anything more than that. There was born a great question: what I can do as an artist? What is art? It is said in two words, but it took me long to find uan formal response. Another thing that made me reflect on and abandon the idea of \u200b\u200bsolving the problems of the world with a picture was that I exhibited these works and two hours were being bought by those who caused the misery. Then I felt I was doing the clown and that's not art. I started a long reflection on what should I do as a painter. First as an athlete, I wondered about my talents. I loved to draw. At that time earned his living as an artist in comics, advertising, etc. But then I thought: what I can improve myself on the paintings of Botticelli, Da Vinci or Picasso? To find out what were my beliefs and possibilities. Just as some athletes jump two meters and another one, I enjoyed most was coloring. When the color involved, I felt a euphoria. Then there orient my vocation. I had the intention to reinvent painting. I posed what for me were the greats like Rembrandt and Velazquez, who not only painted, but reinvented painting. After a long process of research, I concluded that he could make another perception of color, because I realized that all the philosophers said that color was banal, just a companion of what was really fundamental. Was the theme of that time, the closer to the divine reality. Among the more perfect was the work closer to God was. In that sense the color has always been marginalized. However, for me the color was always present. I was born in a town near Caracas where there is a weather condition such that one of the mountains are constantly changing color around by the winds Galicia. People will feel if this purple, blue or yellow. The color was present, but how can I make out an expression or a discourse? Tell people: look at the color is present but is a circumstance, not a certainty. All color depends on how it is viewed. Something can be purple and red at the same time. Then there is a color instability. Something I've wanted to do through my work is to build and reflect on what holds the color as occurring in space. Actually the color is not on the table, but in space. And the culmination of this thinking is the realization of my work where the color really is in space without support.
RMS: You took years to reach this conclusion formally. How to deal with rejection? When he had reached its final proposal, people focused on other issues and not his breakthrough.
CCD: That was a disappointment but also a stimulus. I thought that was because my speech was not clear enough, and that desire to be clear I have to give me really more obvious solutions. But always with this idea: the color launched into space. That was my proposal and I could not change. In my country say: "that is returned goat broke his neck." If I embarked on this there is no turning back. I never doubted forward. To which I have now is an accumulation of failures. One so much that it fails to do well.
CCD: That was my contribution to the color. The color has always been on a plane. The color on the canvas was just a story, part of the story told in a picture, but it was not fundamental. In addition, those who tried to give it another read the color did so within traditional media. That was the problem of the Impressionists who wanted to give mobility to the color. Realized by theories of physics and chemistry that was developed with Chevreul and others. Since then I felt the color was not stable. So the treaty was Chevreul for upholstery of Huillón in order to color the wool and know precisely how to imitate the color of the sketch artist. That gave further information on the color used by the Impressionists, but while acknowledging that it was unstable, he was given a static support. The only idea was to paint Monet forty times the same subject at different times, but it was still a souvenir, a memory for what he saw, and as time went on, "he observed that purple was not there, there was only one memory. So the challenge we had was to discover how this mobility to give color. It was then that I thought that now support the work where you can see the trap that throws light color into space. Now, it looks simple but it is not.
RMS: Something I noticed in one of his landscapes, "The Green Parrot" and "Landscape of Barsiquimeto" where you guess the beginning of the event module color. The tiles are very reminiscent of their first modules.
CCD: Yes, now you can tell, but at that time I did not know.
RMS: I noticed I had not seen his figurative work in Live.
RMS: And the fans of which you speak, you seem to always use red and green.
CCD: Because when Newton came and spoke about how the red and green produce yellow.
CCD: Yes, one must be knowledgeable and know the why of things. Because if everything is not a coincidence and only occurs once. No speech becomes. It's just an idea. Ideas have all the important and difficult it is to create a concept, because the concept is a great platform with which you can justify the life, death, the future or whatever.
RMS: is a discourse so new that you have to guide people. The English who came to the Americas called the pyramids churches because they had no parameters to judge their true address.
CCD: And so they destroyed it, they understood not. But art is learning as well as poetry or music. They teach things that you did not know were there.
RMS: I wanted to talk about a novel I read discussing freedom, and you see that scientists say there is no freedom or free will because we are all so chemical experience. Do you think that art is freedom? You know there's freedom to do his work.
CCD: But look, what you actually have to have is structure. If no structure, no use. Neither the ideas nor the talent. I bet a lot of people, musicians, artists, etc. now what where are they? And, being most intelligent, lacked structure. And that's something I learned from my father, who had a fondness for Parnassians. Of the many writers who put so much time to purge and purify the language, just stay because they had a structure, its beautiful sentences were to lift a glass to air.
RMS: And how does the structure?
CCD: I think who first readings organized with taking a wish. That's instinctive desire to be and do. It shows in the poorer classes. There are children involved in a major program of youth orchestras that come from a lack context, and there are very few who, when making an instrument, want to grow and become a marvel. In our workshop in a poor neighborhood in Caracas, tried to make it there on purpose to get to Venezuela and did not tell me stories. We help people to work in the shop, and his excuse was that they could not tell because they were poor. That is also cultural.
RMS: When confronted with this reality color you are trying to channel the movement of life. I speak of the concept that all people were writers and actors at the same time, and in the context of his work reminds one of the quantum dynamics in the observer / work or actor / author.
CCD reflection I made was why the artist is privileged? Why should that come to listen and pay tribute to someone? So it was something that I opposed. I produced something I wanted to share, like a game. One thing that must have influenced me, the fact that I am an only child, and people always needed. And small toys made with newspapers and other things that allowed me to interact with others children, and that led me to share and include the viewer. Instead DSER adulation became an accomplice. We do between the two, and there is support for the viewer to complete. That is a great contribution of kinetic art that is not understood yet. For the first time in the history of art, real time and space are key instruments of the invention of the art. And instead of being a contemplative art is a participatory art, so it is very topical.
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Image Courtesy of the MFAH
First Image: Carlos Cruz-Diez, Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation), 1965/2004,
three chromo-cubicles (fluorescent light with blue, red, and green filters), the MFAH.
Second Image: Carlos Cruz-Diez in the Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation) installation at the 2006 exhibition
Carlos Cruz-Diez: Life on the Color Previsora \u200b\u200b at the Foundation Gallery in Caracas, Venezuela
