Carlos Cruz-Diez: A Legacy in Color

Carlos Cruz-Diez and the Structure of the Immaterial
Joel Bracho Ghersi

Our general idea of art is usually associated with a few more or less fixed ideas, such as art’s permanence over time, the plasticity of its materials, and the manual nature of its practice. We speak of plastic arts because we assume that artistic production refers to the transformation of matter, a malleability that allows it to become something else. The new thing created from material reconfigured by the artist, we call a work of art. Our job as spectators, then, is to contemplate the work and to recognize in it the skill, the mastery and the hand of its creator.

Carlos Cruz-Diez set out to challenge these concepts. He wanted to look for what he called “a new starting point,” to make art in a way that had never been done before and to reproduce the pleasure of traditional painting by other means. It was a systematic and orderly search that he began just after leaving the Escuela de Artes Plásticas when he decided that he would not paint with oil but rather with less “prestigious” materials, such as gouache. He wanted to find his own way because he was convinced that to paint as he had been taught was to paint like everyone else. He began investigating new supports and techniques, using cardboard and silkscreen, and later fully embraced industrial materials and techniques that would allow him to better express what he wanted to say.

Once he decided that color was to be the center of his artistic discourse, he knew that his objective would not be to produce a plastic object, but rather a support that would allow an event to be produced. He wanted to show, in an artistic way, that color was an unstable and variable circumstance, something that happens and becomes transformed. This is why his work reveals to us not the structure of the material it is made with but rather a phenomenon. His object is not material, as it deals with impermanent matter and the production of ephemeral results in real time and space and our interaction with them.

Fisicromía (Physichromy) is one of his basic instruments in his inquiry and, perhaps, together with Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation), the most emblematic of his work. Faithful to his idea of art as thought and experimentation, he called his work ‘Research.’ With the Fisicromías, Cruz-Diez manages to simultaneously put into play the three conditions he was interested in working with to demonstrate the unstable condition of color: additive color, present in the shades of color produced by the background lines; subtractive color, with the use of plaques made from translucent materials that color space and the support; and reflective color, produced by the collision of light in the small spaces that are generated between the plaques and the background. The artist calls these light traps. Although it is the light that is at play, we are the ones who fall into the trap. We learn to see, and we discover floating colors that change and transform before our eyes.

The Fisicromías offer the viewer a new way to perceive art. Through not looking at the object made by the artist but rather at its result, viewers see the event that is produced within the interstices of that object. In his well-known book, Reflexión sobre el color (Reflections on Color), Cruz-Diez tells us that the Fisicromías propose an indirect reading of color. What’s important is not the colors with which the work has been “painted,” the printed lines or the material from which it is made, but the colors that appear to float and transform in space and time.

To stand in front of and look carefully at a Fisicromía is to behold something that seems alive, a kind of ubiquitous color cloud located in the empty space on this side of the canvas. Even without moving, we can perceive that something is happening. If we then move around, due to the change in our perspective of what is happening there, or to certain modifications in natural or artificial lighting, we always find ourselves in front of another work.