The world has been in rapid change. The things that no sooner we catch the shape than they reshaped. This is the modern life that we are striving to adapt ourselves into. We used to be asked about who we are. And this question was always linked to what we do in our daily lives. “My dad is a teacher”, “She is a diligent housewife”, etc. However, in comparison with the slow-paced life that we found ourselves easy to fit into, modern life seems to be rather bizarre, as it shifts too fast to keep up with. What we do is no longer paired to who we are, since our personalities are constantly varying with the changing nature of our social roles. This highlights the modern world that Carlos Cruz-Diez is at paints to reveal——the instability of the world and the way it changes us as moderners.
One of his works Intervention In Urban Spaces uses the street as a Medium for Art. The pavement at the cross of roads is decorated with color stripes, reminding us of the music staff that gives an account of the melody of modern life. Pedestrians, in this case, interweaving across the lines are tantamount to notes that defining the rhythm of every cord. Sometimes, they are gathered, while the other times they are set apart, like sempre and segno that signal the change of the tune. Therefore, the shifting nature of modern life is captured by the hurried steps and the constantly changing crowds. In this way, the artist creates an ephemeral expression that the transformation of modern life can be narrowed down to the very minute, even second. These ephemeral works are a way of producing different readings of urban spaces and of deconsecrating the utilitarian objects of urban furniture. Cruz-Diez cleverly selects pavement as the medium for delivering the message of transience. Because no one ceases to move on the pavement. This ever-moving scenario encapsulates the fast-paced life that shapes who we are.
The question of who we are can be traced in many of Cruz-Diez’s works. The Chromosaturation is an artificial environment composed of three color chambers, one red, one green, and one blue that immerse the visitor in a completely monochrome situation. Those color lights are free from any bound. They are not defined by any worldly shapes but solely captured by our human eyes. This experience is somewhat against the habitual way of seeing the world, namely, our retinas are accustomed to receiving a wide range of colors simultaneously and identifying “shapes” accordingly. The Chromosaturation can act as a trigger, activating in the viewer the notion of color as a material or physical situation, going into space without the aid of any form or even without any support, regardless of cultural beliefs. Cruz-Diez recreates a space devoid of forms, the supposed objects that the viewers find useful to define a place. He highlights the simplicity of colors in a way that changes how we perceive the world and the relationship we have with our surroundings. No longer seeing us subject to the “shape” of the world, we recognize ourselves in the de-shaped chambers that enable us to look at ourselves independently of the sophisticated secular world.
His work reminds us that we should sometimes simplify our lives to get a better knowledge of ourselves.
If Chromosaturation simplifies the way we see the world, Chromoscope (Paris 1968) renders modern nightlife florescent. Cruz-Diez creates an instrument for us to carry as if we are wandering in the nocturnal landscape of large cities covered with Neon Lights. Instead of seeing the world with naked eyes, we look at the world through a “spyglass”. The Chronoscope is a work closely linked to the possibilities offered by the nightlife in the big cities, the more numerous the possibilities are the more visual situations are produced. In the artist’s eye, the world is not pre-existent, but created and recreated with a “spyglass” through which the world emerges in our eyes but at the same time is carried “in our mind”. The world is there, not to be perceived but to be conceived. This is how the Chromoscope transforms our view of the world. Through the Chromoscope, by a diffraction effect, shapes are pulverized and all the light points are separated into the colors of the spectrum. It is an instrument intended to operate the transfiguration of the nocturnal landscape of large cities. Its attraction does not reside on the object itself but the visual event that it generates. No longer passively receiving the lights, we actively travel back and forth from the reality and the fictitious world begotten by the instrument. It is a piece that acts as an intermediary between reality and our eye, conditioning our sight to a new perception of our surroundings.
Light is not only utilized as a means to reveal a world afresh but also introduced as a psychological metaphor.
The Physichromie is a structure designed to reveal certain circumstances and conditions related to color, changing according to the movement of the viewer and the intensity of the light, and thus projecting color into space to create an evolutionary situation of additive, reflective, and subtractive color.
A physichromie acts as a "light trap" in a space where a series of color frames interact; frames that transform each other, generating new ranges of colors not present on the support. Thus, the color fills the space confined between the vertical sheets — light-modulators — that cover the entire work. In addition, due to the effects of the viewer or light source, a series of color variations are created in them, similar to those observed in the real space of the landscape.
These color variations that endlessly repeat themselves every day, are not always the same, due to the variations of intensity and nature of the light that showers them. Hence the name Physichromie, by calling into play the color light — the physical color.
In this program, the light is no longer something to see but some idea conjured up through our minds. The light-modulators, mimicking different stages of thinking manifest numerous possibilities of our imaginative world. The “light trap”, therefore, turns out to be a mirror reflecting the abundant imagination of human minds.
Cruz-Diez’s works target various possible roles the light plays in modern society and therefore, via many of his light programs, we refresh the ways we see the world.
