Concrete Matters

In a process comparable to that of Lygia Clark, the painting of Hélio Oiticica opened up into space around the end of the 1950s, seeking that vital dialogue with the public—the here and now—that innumerable artists dreamed of over the course of the 20th century. This Spatial Relief is characteristic of this dynamic, as a geometric painting on a plane that, while still based on geometry, seeks to create a body-to-body relationship with the spectator. “It is no longer possible to accept development ‘within the frame’ […] Far from being the ‘death of painting,’ this is its salvation […] How clear everything is now: painting must go out into space, in order to be complete.”1 From these spatial reliefs, Oiticica would move on to create his nuclei—penetrable works—and from there, environments that would open up to welcome the audience into a space governed by art where it was possible to experience situations that the artist considered “liberating.” The sensual contact with the public and the work’s subjective charge, clearly demonstrate a distancing from concrete tendencies and explain the birth of a new movement: Neo-Concretism.

The Physichromies are structures that seek to confront the spectator with color as a luminous phenomenon in constant transformation rather than as a static and fixed unit. With pigment fixed on small strips of cardboard that are glued to one another at different heights, the aim is to, in a way, trap the reflected color, light color or physical color, to launch it into space. Therein lays the source of the title Fisicromía. The centrality of color for Cruz-Diez is explained in the artist’s words: “Since color appears and disappears over the course of our ‘dialogue’ with space and time, we become conscious of a phenomenon particular to human nature […] It is possible, furthermore, that thanks to color, and by being conscious of ‘elemental vision’ devoid of pre-established meanings, we may awaken mechanisms of sensory perception that are even more subtle and complex.”1 In the case of Fisicromía Nº 21, the work is restricted to four colors: green, red, black and white. Using these alone, just as the scientist Edwin Herbert Land (1909-1991) did in the experiments that brought about the Polaroid photograph, Carlos Cruz-Diez seeks to produce—by way of an optical mixture—other colors of the solar spectrum. As a result, the spectrum of visible colors is greater than the sum of the pigments employed.

This work of moving simplicity is a characteristic example of what Willys de Castro called the Objeto Activo [Active Object]. It is a painting that has ceased to be the representation of another thing, becoming a pictorial object in and of itself. It is nevertheless an object on whose surface a curious occurrence seems to take place. At its left edge appears a blue stripe, broken in its center. Something is amiss, as the rotund contrast of blue and yellow emphatically demonstrates. On the other side of the work, at its right edge, a small blue square seems to indicate that its origin is to be found precisely in that void beckoning it from the left. Then, once the connection is established between one extreme of the work and the other, that shining yellow surface separating them becomes charged with an additional tension, activated, imbued with energy. However, the interesting thing about that expressive tension, the thing that keeps it ever active, is its indeterminacy. Nothing, in effect, allows us to establish exactly what is going on there: whether that small blue square has broken loose from the stripe on the left or whether, on the other hand, it is about to return to it. Something has just taken place, or is—forever—about to occur.