THE REVEALING DIALOGUE BETWEEN CRUZ-DIEZ AND ARIEL JIMÉNEZ
Carlos Cruz-Diez in conversation with Ariel Jiménez is the title of the first of a series of books included in an important editorial project conceived by the Cisneros Foundation, aimed at enriching the history under construction of Latin American art through a valuable resource that has been over looked by critics: the unreplaceable dialogue with the artist. This book recovers a foundational practice of Western culture that, as Gabriel Pérez Barreiro points out in his lucid introduction, dissolves the modernist myth about the creator’s vision being irrelevant for understanding the work. To participate, as readers, in the art of conversation through this dialogue between Cruz-Diez, whose commitment with the reinvention of art has been reflected in the search for the purest way of “projecting color into space”, and the renowned Venezuelan critic Ariel Jiménez who was his assistant in Paris is tantamount to reviving the trajectory of a life devoted to experimentation, and the way in which it has become inscribed in the history of its own time.
The conversation alternates the chronological reconstruction of this unceasing experimentation with the sharp reflections of the critic. This exercise conveys the emotion that precedes revelations. With the need to explore the common history of Latin American artists the imperative to find “a discourse of their own” in order to “avoid oblivion” as its point of departure, it reconstructs the journey that goes from the formative initiation, through the periods of doubt and lack of understanding of the artist’s findings in the midst of geopolitical conjunctures, to final acclaim. It includes rememorations such as the discovery that “knowing how to see” is inseparable from imagining, and Cruz-Diez’s long process of renouncement to what he calls “a style” and Jiménez identifies as “the pleasure derived from painting in its existing forms,” in order to be finally able to produce work originating in the very instability of color escaping from the support, and thus enter into history. Parallel to this, it recre- ates sensible aspects such as the link between the mediaeval organization of the Flemish workshops and the moving way in which Cruz-Diez has succeed- ed in making his life and his art one and the same thing.
Among this dialogue’s multiple contributions to the rewriting of art is the specification that the decisive turn towards Kinetic Art in Venezuela was not due to the influence of the exhibition presented by the Arte Concreto Invención group but to Otero’s Las Cafeteras. And also, to the relationship of the latter with industry and with the modernizing project.
The reader witnesses Cruz-Diez’s titanic struggle with materials. A journey in search of possibilities that includes the construction of machines he himself made to challenge the limitations of cardboard, or of PVC, or of aluminum, finally to reach digital technology, without ever losing the artisanal facture that can be confirmed in his studio. A journey that paradoxically frees the notion of authorship from the physical execution. Since what is enduring is Cruz-Diez’s invention of art based on the projection of color into space through the radiations of the physichromies that reminded him of the sunset sky in the Caracas Valley, the creation of a system capable of modulating the light and making the viewer experience the emergence of colors in a unique present moment. The dialogue allows us to witness the intimate relationship between the affective investigation of the theory of color how he went from subtraction, to addition and to chromatic induction and the notion of public art, committed with the human being.
The reader recovers the utopian undertone that animates this art capable of affording him the participative experience of color transforming itself at the rhythm of his/her changing perception, in the midst of the transit along the urban fabric or in the isolation of a technological temple like the Raúl Leoni Hydroelectric Power Station, in Guri, Venezuela. In the end we understand why Cruz-Diez is able to imagine that in future centuries, materials which have not yet been invented will make it possible to recreate his unique way of generating the emergence of a color that becomes active and floats in space, “free from any material limitation,” in a state of pure present.
