The exhibition focuses on Chromosaturation, an installation conceived and realized in the second half of the 1960s
Additive color, physichromie, chromatic induction - what, exactly, is color? Is it a particular combination of light and dark, the spectral reality of light, or the encounter between the observer’s interiority and the exterior world that surrounds them? Chromo-interference, Transchromia – and where is the place of color? Where does it originate, where does it settle? In the light that carries it, on the surface of objects, or among the illusions that dwell behind our eyes, in our minds? The installation Cromosaturation, conceived and realized in the second half of the 1960s, is an unusual work in the career of Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Usually tied to bidimensionality in his research on color, here he abandons the rigid dualisms that almost always govern our ways of thinking: the good and evil of morality, the true and false of the rational, the beautiful and ugly of art.
Cruz-Diez accesses tridimensionality to turn color into a place and an event
Rather than a conceptual inquiry - despite his claim of a scientific status for his artistic investigation - Cruz-Diez accesses tridimensionality to make color a place and an event. To inhabit color implies abandoning both the subjectivist view (where color is a product of our physiological apparatus) and the objectivist one (where it is simply a property of light). In Cruz-Diez’s three rooms, one walks through the estranging experience of how monochromia can modify the way we relate to the space we occupy (anticipating Olafur Eliasson’s Room for one color by more than thirty years). Each of the primary additive colors - red, blue, green - that occupies the three minimal rooms of the installation becomes the place itself, saturating the space with its own chromatic saturation.
Visiting the exhibition, one becomes saturated by color and encounters people equally saturated: everything and everyone changes in the transition from one room to another
Even the meaning of color becomes saturated in this way: it is no longer just an encounter between perception and objectivity, but a reality endowed with uniform spatio temporal properties and, at the same time, an experience - which is, ultimately, the hardest thing to define. Art critics often make the mistake of becoming mere spectators: someone who goes to a place, sees what needs to be seen, and then writes a review. In commenting on this type of installation, we too often forget the space - that is the color - as a place of passage and encounter: the social dimension of color. Indeed, moving between the rooms, we ourselves become saturated by color; we encounter people who are equally saturated; and everything and everyone changes in the transition from one room to another. In Troubadour poetry, as in Dante’s verses, the rooms were chambers, places of passage, where we keep what we most desire but cannot possess: love, color and the list could go on forever, without ever reaching saturation.
In these rooms, one walks through the estranging experience of how monochromia can modify the way we relate to the space we occupy
