Carlos Cruz-Diez

Biography

At his father’s plant, sunlight passed through bottles of soda and fell in red patches on the boy’s white shirt. Carlos Cruz-Diez remembered those reflections all his life.

Many years later he came to the conclusion that color is in the space around us, and that what matters is knowing how to see it.

He was born on 17 August 1923 in the La Pastora district of Caracas. His father, Carlos Eduardo Cruz Lander, was a chemist and poet of Canarian descent; his mother, Mariana Diez Feo, came from a family that included many notable figures of Venezuelan history, and her grandfather, General Mariano Diez, had fought for the country’s independence. The boy went to the Colegio Atenas and then to the Liceo Andrés Bello. In 1940 Carlos entered the School of Plastic and Applied Arts in Caracas, where, in his own words, he experienced an “awakening to the euphoria of color”. He studied with Marcos Castillo and Luis Alfredo López Méndez and made friends with Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto, his future companions in geometric abstraction and kinetic art. One of his teachers, Rafael Ramón González, taught him to paint not the flat color of an object but the nuances it is made of. In 1945 Cruz-Diez graduated as a teacher of applied arts.

For the next ten years he earned his living through graphics and advertising: he drew comics and cartoons for newspapers and a children’s magazine, illustrated an oil company’s magazine, taught painting and art history, and from 1946 was creative director of the Venezuelan branch of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency. His first solo exhibition was held in 1947 at the Venezuelan-American Institute. At that time he painted the poor outskirts of Caracas in the spirit of social realism, and an exhibition by Héctor Poleo that same year showed him that social reality could be painted differently. In the early 1950s he realized that depicting poverty did nothing for the people he painted, and he began to look for another language.

In 1954, at the 15th Official Salon, he showed designs for outdoor murals built from geometric elements, and his turn to abstraction surprised everyone. In 1955 he spent a year and a half in El Masnou near Barcelona and went to Paris to see the exhibition “Le Mouvement” at the Galerie Denise René, in which Soto took part; in 1957 he founded a graphic and industrial design studio in Caracas. In 1959 came the first “Additive Color” and the first “Physichromie”. The surface of a Physichromie is assembled from colored strips of cardboard, aluminum or Plexiglas set on two levels, one flat and one raised; the color vibrates and changes depending on where the viewer stands, how far away he is and where the light comes from. In “Additive Color” two colors give rise to the illusion of a third.

In 1960 he moved to Paris with his family for good. In 1961 his work was shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in “The Responsive Eye”, an exhibition important for kinetic art as a whole. That same year he conceived the “Deconditioning Labyrinth”, his first color environment that the viewer walks into, and the “Chromosaturations” grew out of it. In 1966 he won the American Art Biennial in Córdoba, in 1967 he received the international painting prize at the São Paulo Biennial, and in 1970 he represented Venezuela at the 35th Venice Biennale. His first work in the city was temporary: in 1969 twenty booths of colored Plexiglas were set up on the Boulevard Saint-Germain for a street festival.

Then came dozens of monumental commissions, most of them in Venezuela: the floor of Simón Bolívar International Airport at Maiquetía (1974), a color environment for the hydroelectric plant at the Guri Dam (1977), the headquarters of the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich (1975), a double-sided Physichromie on the Place du Venezuela in Paris (1976), a sculpture on the border between Andorra and Spain (1991), the walkways to the baseball stadium in Miami (2011). He valued his exterior walls above all for their social meaning, as a way of sharing his research on color with any passer-by. To my mind, this is where his early social realism found its continuation, only without a story.

In all, between 1959 and 1995, eight investigations took shape: “Additive Color”, “Physichromie”, “Chromatic Induction”, “Chromointerférence”, “Transchromie”, “Chromosaturation”, “Chromoscope” and “Color in Space”. In 1972–1973 he taught at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts et des Techniques Cinétiques in Paris; in 1988 he had a large exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, which placed him in line with Albers’s legacy; and in 1989 he published the book “Reflection on Color”. In 1995 he created a computer program that lets the viewer compose arrangements of forms and color harmonies.

In 1997 the Carlos Cruz-Diez Museum of Print and Design opened in Caracas, with the artist as its president. In 2005 his family set up his foundation in Houston and his atelier, in 2008 he became a French citizen, and in 2011 the retrospective “Color in Space and Time” opened in Houston, later shown in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. In 2012 he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor, and in 2016 he published his memoirs, “Memories of What I Remember”.

Carlos Cruz-Diez died on 27 July 2019 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, less than a month before his ninety-sixth birthday.