Carlos Cruz-Díez

The work

Jaune additif Denise “A” (Denise “A” Additive Yellow)
2007
180 x 80 cm
Chromography on Dibond aluminum

Denise “A” Additive Yellow consists of 3 mm wide black, red, and green lines drawn vertically from top to bottom. The proximity of the lines and the combination of colors create apparent geometric shapes, including an elongated yellowish rectangle that crosses the work diagonally. When we get closer, we can see that neither the perimeter of the rectangle nor the yellow color actually exist. They only exist in our perception, especially the yellow, which is an additive color created by the juxtaposition of narrow vertical lines of green and red that produce an optical vibration that forms the color yellow on our retina.

The yellow geometric rectangle we distinguish is the result of the accumulation of colored lines, but they are not shapes in the traditional sense of the term. They are produced in the physiological, visual, and psychological spheres, since our mind does not see an isolated color but rather the overall chromatic ensemble.

The creation of yellow in our brain is based on the decomposition of white light into three primary colors: green, red, and blue. Each pair of mixed primary colors generates secondary colors by addition, which are yellow, cyan, and magenta. The rest of the shades are obtained by modifying the intensity of the colors that are mixed. Therefore, returning to our work, Additive Yellow is the color obtained by mixing green and red on our retina.

The name Denise is a tribute to Cruz-Díez’s gallery owner, Denise René, who from 1955 onwards protected and encouraged the new generation of kinetic artists after World War II. This work has another version, hence its classification as “A,” and was created in 2007, possibly on the occasion of Cruz-Díez’s exhibition at his gallery that year.

The artist

(Caracas, Venezuela, 1923- Paris, 2019)

Carlos Cruz-Díez, together with Alejandro Otero and Jesús Soto, form the triad of artists who, after World War II, placed Venezuela on the map of modern art. They found in geometric abstraction the foundations for developing their artistic concepts within the framework of kinetic art: practices that experiment with the modification of perception produced by light, color, and movement, following the path opened up by some artists of the historical avant-garde such as Duchamp, Moholy-Nagy, Calder, and Naum Gabo.

CCD was born in Venezuela in 1923. It was a poor country with scarce resources controlled by local warlords and governed by frequent authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s, when oil exploitation began in Venezuela, that economic benefits allowed for some modernization of the country’s infrastructure, but not for an improvement in the situation of poverty and social injustice experienced by a large part of the Venezuelan people.

Artistic modernity and the avant-garde were almost unknown in Venezuela, and CCD, like his peers, considered it a historical duty to “invent” a modern culture that they had not inherited.

The unease caused by CCD’s doubts about his identity as an artist, the uncertainty about the country’s political and cultural future, and the attraction of Paris as the historical capital of modernity led him to travel to Europe in 1960, where he met his friend Jesús Soto in Paris.

CCD had alternated his art studies with work in the press as an illustrator and was well versed in photomechanical techniques for color printing. He had also studied historical theories on chromaticism, from Goethe to the Bauhaus to the industrial theories of Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid. When he settled in Paris, he was already convinced that he had found the fundamental theme of his career as an artist: “launching color into space,” an original artistic discourse based on the perception of color produced by the physiology of the human eye, which he developed from 1954 until the end of his life. He based his work on constant experiments with the radiation produced when two planes of color touch and generate a virtual chromatic line; with the inductions or optical creations of complementary colors; and with other forms of chromatic modification and recreation in which he places the viewer as the unwitting “author” of a work that is modified by their own movement. CCD called the narrow lines of color that generate the perception of new colors “chromatic event modules,” and the works in which the retina generates new colors thanks to the physical properties of color “physiochromies.”