Carlos Cruz Diez

Painter and designer Son of the chemist Carlos Eduardo Cruz and Mariana Diez. In 1940 he enrolled in the School of Plastic and Applied Arts, where he was a student of Marcos Castillo, Luis Alfredo López Méndez and Juan Vicente Fabbiani, among others. During his student days he collaborated with humorous vignettes for the newspaper La Esfera and the children's magazine Tricolor.

In 1942 he left the pure art career and continued studying for the teacher of manual arts and applied arts, a career that ended in 1945. In 1944 he worked as a graphic designer for publications of the Creole Petroleum Corporation. In 1945 he joined the teaching team of the School of Plastic and Applied Arts, an activity he held until 1955. He was creative director of the agency McCann-Erickson Advertising of Venezuela (1946-1951). In 1947 he traveled to New York, where he took courses in art and advertising. His pictorial production of these years is developed in the line of social realism. At that time he was part of the Free Art Workshop of Caracas. Between 1953 and 1955, he worked as an illustrator for the newspaper Momento y rojo y negro. In 1954 he began an interest in abstract currents and carried out a series of exterior paramural projects with colored geometrical elements, some of which could be manipulated. He presents these projects at the XV Salón Oficial (1954), which produce surprise comments for his "conversion to abstraction". A year later he travels to El Masnou and Barcelona (Spain), visits Paris and sees for the first time the works of Jesús Soto in a kinetic exhibition at the Galería Denise René. From that experience, between 1956 and 1957, the series Mobile rhythmic objects, Dynamic rhythmic signs and Chain constructions, Works in which the problem of consecutive movement, highlights its concern for the relationships between form and color, as well as for the animation of the pictorial surface produced by the contrast and layout of the design on the plane. These works were exhibited for the first time in the Buchholz Gallery (Madrid, 1956).

LIGHTOPIA

In 1957 he returned to Venezuela and created the Visual Arts Studio dedicated to the graphic arts and industrial design. The assistant director and professor of painting at the Cristóbal Rojas School (1958-1960). He also teaches typography and design in the Faculty of Journalism of the UCV. From 1959, the artist's interest in kinetic and chromatic phenomena became increasingly evident. Data for this year Yellow additive, and the principle of optical colors begins to develop in his works. Also, the realization of his first Physichromy, the time introduced by the artist, the derivative of the expression "physical chromatism". From the first Physichromies, Cruz-Diez introduces chromatic modifications and techniques that lead him to expand the format of the works, fact that allows him to integrate them into architectural spaces.

Cruz-Diez is considered one of the essential Venezuelan artists of the twentieth century, his work has spanned the international scale to deepen the most important research on kinetic and optical experiences. The fundamental basis of Cruz-Diez's kineticism, as Alfredo Boulton affirmed, "is directly associated with color in relation to space and form: the dimension, the format of its designs, the linear pattern it uses, as well as the the spaces they use, they all have a harmonic model [...] each value has its place, each optical emission has the right space to receive, each line, each geometric shape has its own margin, plotted, never left to chance , which responds to a mechanism scientifically prepared to find it in the human vision, precisely, everything that Cruz-Diez wanted ...

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