Carlos Cruz Diez
The master Carlos Cruz-Diez was born in Caracas in 1923, Venezuelan plastic artist, is one of the greatest representatives of kinetic art worldwide. The passion for art began as a child with painting and his fascination with color arises as a result of the small factory of soda bottles that his father owned, because in it he discovers the reflection of light and color thanks to the impact of the sun in the stained glass. He decides to be an artist, which is why he enrolled in the School of Plastic and Applied Arts in 1940 where he obtained the diploma of Professor of Applied Arts. There he receives classes from outstanding teachers, including Marcos Castillo, Luis Alfredo López Méndez and Juan Vicente Fabbiani. Then he is particularly interested in the work of Francisco Narváez and Héctor Poleo. His painting at that time was still focused on social realism. However, already in this training period he became aware of the importance of working with color. He learned from one of his teachers, Rafael Ramón González, not to paint the flat and obvious color of the objects but to interpret the nuances that compose it. Years later, he deepened this precept, reaching one of his greatest discoveries: to appreciate that the color is in the space that surrounds us and that the point lies in knowing how to see the color. In 1955 he lives for a year and a half in Barcelona, Spain. That year he travels to Paris and visits the exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René and, the following year, exhibits at the Buchholz Gallery in Madrid the series of Parenchyma and Mobile rhythmic objects. After brief trips to New York and Paris in 1957, he returned to Caracas and founded the Visual Arts Studio, dedicated to graphic and industrial design. In 1959 he made his first Couleur Additive and Physichromie and in 1960, he decided to settle permanently in Paris with his family. In 1961 he participated in the Bewogen Beweging exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1965 he was appointed Advisor at the Noroit Cultural Center, in Arras, France and this year he participated in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exhibition that marks the official consecration of kinetic art. From 1972 to 1973, Cruz-Diez worked as a professor at the Higher School of Fine Arts and Kinetic Techniques, in Paris. Between 1986 and 1993 he is a professor at the International Institute for Advanced Studies, in Caracas. In 1989, the first edition of his book Reflection on color was published in Caracas, based on his various plastic research linked to the study of color as an "autonomous reality in continuous mutation." By 1997 he is appointed President and member of the Superior Council of the Carlos Cruz-Diez Museum of Design and Design Foundation, which aims to study, disseminate, collect and preserve the work of national and international graphic designers and artists related to the stamp and design. In 2005 his family created the Cruz-Ten Foundation dedicated to the conservation, development, dissemination and research of his artistic and conceptual legacy. In 2008, two years before the 50th anniversary of his arrival in Paris, Cruz-Diez acquired French nationality. For 2011, he opened his biggest retrospective exhibition Carlos Cruz-Diez. Color in Space and Time at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFAH) in Houston in the United States and in 2012 he received the rank of Officer of the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur. His work is part of the permanent collections of museums such as: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; Center Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among others. Cruz-Diez has focused his research on the dissociation of the form-color binomial by proposing to release the color of the form. Starting from the fragmentation of the plane, it uses chromatic event modules (series of lines in strict programmed order) to demonstrate its theoretical postulates about color. Thus, rhombuses and other forms that appear in his works are not conventional in the traditional sense of the term; they are the result of the accumulation of modules that, by superposition and repetition, generate virtual forms such as squares, triangles, rectangles or others. The teacher resided in Paris from 1960 with the aim of developing and structuring the different supports that would allow him to materialize his plastic discourse. Thus, between 1959 and 1995 he carried out eight investigations that show different color behaviors: Addition Chromatique, Physichromie, Induction Chromatique, Chromointerférence, Transchromie, Chromosaturation, Chromoscope and Couleur dans l’espace. In the last 50 years, Cruz-Diez has carried out works on an urban and monumental scale in various countries. Some of his most important awards and recognitions are: 1966 Grand Prize, III American Art Biennial, National University of Córdoba, Faculty of Exact Sciences, Córdoba, Argentina; 1967 International Painting Prize, IX Biennial of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; 1969 Second Prize, International Painting Festival, Château-Musée de Cagnes-sur-Mer, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France; 1971 National Prize for Plastic Arts, National Institute of Culture and Fine Arts (INCIBA), Caracas, Venezuela; 1976 Arts Integration Award, VI Architecture Biennial, College of Architects of Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela; 1981 Order Andrés Bello, First Class, Caracas, Venezuela; 2002 Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, France; 2008 Medal of Honor of the City of Marcigny, Marcigny, France; 2010 AICA Award 2009, International Association of Art Critics, Caracas, Venezuela; 2011 Gold Medal of the Society of the Americas, Cipriani Wall Street, New York, United States; 2011 Prize for the best live artist of the Estampa 2011 fair, Madrid, Spain; 2012 Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur, Official degree, Paris, France; 2012 Páez Medal of the Arts, New York, United States. (VAEA); 2012 Penagos Drawing Award, Mapfre Foundation, Madrid, Spain; among others.
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