Julio Le Parc
02/03/2013 > 13/04/2013
Opening on 02/03/2013, from 7 pm to 9 pm
Founding member of the GRAV (Visual Art Research Group) and recipient of the Grand Prize for Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, JULIO LE PARC (b. 1928 in Mendoza, Argentina, lives and works in Cachan, France) is a major figure of art history.
An artist of historical importance and an influential figure in contemporary art, JULIO LE PARC's work has initiated a number of contemporary aesthetic approaches; he is regarded as one of the crucial players in optical and kinetic art, an international trend that greatly amplified research into movement and its visual effects between 1950 and 1975. Based on perceptive disturbance, dematerialization, formal reduction, and the study of the phenomenon of light, LE PARC's visual repertory was expressed in paintings, mobiles, reliefs and environments, which set about perverting the traditional system of looking at art by disrupting the viewer's conditions for observing it.
For his second solo exhibition at BUGADA & CARGNEL gallery JULIO LE PARC will display a wide array of landmark paintings, ranging from the early 70's to today, executed with an implacable anti-pictorial logic which makes the simplest geometry becoming the surprise enemy of the form itself. Such a method, incidentally, exonerates him from any formalism or expression of a personal artistic sensibility.
From 1958 onwards, LE PARC develops a unitary system governing surface, shapes and colors, as well as their relationship to the picture plane: the development of the paintings is based on the repetition and the combination of geometric patterns that were limited at the beginning to the three non-colors (black, white and gray), and then expanded from 1959 to the fourteen colors of the chromatic prism, the only colors that LE PARC will concede to himself from that moment onwards. The shapes and colors are organized by simple combinations: based on a rigorous and basic system, they offer a possibility of almost infinite combination where any trace of manual implementation and subjective composition is eliminated.
At the same time these sequences and progressions, take into account the rational organization of the surface and the eye of the beholder at the same time. The simple geometric shapes, the squares, the circles, the rectangles, are chosen for their neutrality and their ability to establish a visual connection with the viewer: they invade in a programmed way the canvas, always leaving the viewer's imagination free to pursue these shapes beyond the frame.
Over the past decades, JULIO LE PARC has widely exhibited worldwide. His work is the subject of a major exhibition at Palais de Tokyo Paris until May 20 and it will have the place of honor in the exhibition Dynamo at the Galeries Nationales of the Grand Palais, Paris. The DarosLatinAmerica Foundation will open its new venue in Rio de Janeiro with a major solo exhibition of JULIO LE PARC' light works from September.
Among recent noticeable exhibitions we can remember Suprasensorial, Experiments in Light, Color and Space at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington in 2010-2011; Erre, variations labyrinthiques in 2011 at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2011, and the Nuit Blanche, on October 6, 2012 in Paris where he lightened the Obelisque of the Place de la Concorde.