Carlos Cruz-Diez

The Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez is well known within Latin America as a pioneering Conceptualist, but he is lamentably less familiar to audiences elsewhere. “Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time,” a retrospective spanning his sixty year career, should help spread the word. The show features over one hundred and fifty works—paintings, sculptures, environments, public interventions—made between 1940 and the present, and it proves that the artist deserves wider recognition for engaging the phenomenology of color and form in startling ways.

The sprawling exhibition includes many memorable works, such as the group of two-tone paintings from the late 1950s whose wavy patterns, and titles such as Vibraciones en el espacio (Vibrations in Space), 1957, earned the artist an association with Op art; they continue to confuse the brain and amuse the eye. Elsewhere hang over fifty absorbing pieces from “Physichromie,” a major, ongoing series begun in 1959. Each framed piece involves pigment-saturated strips of material (cardboard, metal, plastic) mounted and arranged side by side in layers so that as the viewer moves, various colors and lines become visible. Physichromie 589, 1972, appears in one moment to be an acid-toned checkerboard surrounded by purple, and in the next a sea of yellow floating above blue and white squares.

The most spectacular work in the exhibition, hands down, is the color environment Cromosaturación (Chromosaturation). First conceived in 1965 and realized in various ways since, here it takes the shape of three connected rooms bathed in blue-, red-, or green-filtered fluorescent light. Where one space spills into the next, colors mix and the result is disorienting. As a viewer circulates around the white blocks that dot the space, the blocks seem to become different hues. Even for those familiar with Minimalist installations in nearby Marfa, this is an event. It renews one’s belief in the radical potential of light and color to bring awareness to the body’s existence in space and time.