Luis Tomasello

In the book-object Negro el 10, the last collaboration between Julio Cortázar* and Luis Tomasello, the writer accurately describes the artist’s creative procedure. He states that “…This alchemist has not sought to freeze light into precious matter, but rather precisely the opposite: a solid and motionless object expands to become light and color, trembles in space, beats with the heart of the viewer that is beholding it.” The precision of this paragraph is hard to beat. In his work, Tomasello manipulates, with the skill of the person who knows how to transmute matter, elements of everyday life − whether they be wood, pigments or light − transforming them into a wonderful experience for the viewer.
The poems by Cortázar that make up this volume are inspired by the series Lumière noire, which the artist developed as of the early 1980s, and in which he has taken his work in a different direction. He now starts from bas-reliefs painted entirely in black, where the thin hollow lines perforate abysses of penetrating darkness. These works glimpse the mysteries that nest in the shadows, while ratifying at the same time the intensity generated by space − the deepest blacks are attained in its presence − formulating a sort of disciplined but not less suggestive version of Lucio Fontana’s spatialist cosmic cuts.
Until that moment he had explored one of the variants of kinetic art, whose static geometric reliefs, predominantly white, become mobile by dint of the dynamic possibilities of lighting − the artist prefers the changing natural light for his works − and by the multiple viewpoints induced by the spectators’ displacements.
And as the night is not conceivable without the day, since that time the subtle black objects that explore the frontiers of the visible cohabit in his production with the diaphanousness of his luminous and chromatic reliefs, displaying in both his inexhaustible ars combinatoria.
These qualities may be appreciated in the exhibition “Tomasello. Estructura visible y color reflejado” (“Tomasello: Visible Structure and Reflected Color”) curated by Serge Lemoine, Emeritus Professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and until a few years ago, Director of the Musée d’ Orsay, which is being featured at Ascaso Gallery’s Miami venue from February 24 through March. Lemoine is a specialist in geometric abstraction, and based on this erudition, he has selected 50 representative works produced between 1975 and 2011, which cover different aspects of the work of this master of kinetic art.
Born in the city of La Plata and trained in academies in Buenos Aires, Tomasello settled in Paris in 1957, joining the ranks of this international movement together with other Latin American artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, Julio Le Parc, Gregorio Vardánega and Martha Boto, to name just a few.
Tomasello adopted geometry following his first trip to Europe in 1951, after appreciating the work of Piet Mondrian. His admiration for the founder of Neo-Plasticism, one of the currents that gave rise to constructive abstraction at the beginning of the 20th century, led him to borrow from him some elements which he would retain to date, such as the predilection for essential geometric figures such as the square − in his case, also projected onto space as a cube −, chromatic austerity, and balanced compositions, relying mostly on vertical and horizontal axes, and resorting to the grid pattern even as a basis to structure those works in which he departed from it. From the Dutch artist he also absorbed the need to associate visual arts and architecture, executing murals for public and private buildings in Mexico, France, Morocco, Nicaragua, Norway, Argentina, and recently, the United States. The exhibition illustrates this aspect, since it features a model of a pond and a marble fountain like the one created in 1986 for the Court Building in Meaux, France.
The lengthy trajectory of this admirable 96-year-old artist, who is still active, is punctuated by landmark achievements. In 1955, he participated in Buenos Aires, together with Carmelo Arden Quin, in the foundation and management of the Asociación Arte Nuevo (New Art Association), an institution which continued with the development and dissemination of abstract art initiated by the Concrete Art groups that emerged in Argentina in the mid-1940s.
As of 1957, inspired by Mondrian’s Boogie-Woogie, Tomasello starts producing paintings with an optical effect, inquiring into the dynamic properties of color. He soon replaces the modules painted on the plane with cylindrical rods (stiges), giving rise to his characteristic reliefs.
Unlike other artists concerned with endowing Mondrian’s geometric constants with a spatial dimension, as is the case of the French artist Jean Gorin, Tomasello utilizes cylinders, cubes and polyhedrons fixed by one of their edges as elements which are suitable to inquire into the instability of color based on its relative position, creating multiple tonalities depending on the incidence of the light source. But perhaps his contribution to this issue resides in the method of coloring the faces of the bodies, those which are hidden from a frontal view, whose color is reflected on the support, thus creating fluctuating chromatic halos, which are, in a way, elusive. This is what the artist terms “color-sensation”, characteristic of his Chromoplastic Atmospheres, on which he has been working assiduously since 1960.
With these works he joined the circuit of Kinetic Art exhibits that had their peak moment during those years, participating in the first place in “Bewogen Beweging”, held in 1961 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, later to present a solo show at Denise René Gallery in Paris in 1962. As of that moment he became a distinguished representative of this trend, and he toured the world with his oeuvre, his good nature and the poetic and transforming capacity of his alchemy.

*Julio Cortázar, text for the book-object created in collaboration with Luis Tomasello, Negro el 10, Paris, Ed. Maximilien Guiol, 1984.

...............................................................................
**Professor at the University of Buenos Aires
Member of AACA/AICA
Curator at the Virtual Center of Argentine Art
www.arteargentino.buenosaires.gob.ar