After a long day of playing with lemurs at Jungle Island and gawking at the graffiti on the Wynwood Walls in Miami, we are running short of time. We have just under an hour at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), known for its modern and contemporary collections of international art. Art is in the air for we are visiting a week before the annual international art fair Art Basel. White skeletons of the exhibit areas are being fixed under the crisp blue Miami sky.
We are late, but we are also lucky, for a special Art Basel preview show of Julio Le Parc has just opened and the guide at the entrance suggests we look no further and get in. We comply. It is the 88-year-old Argentina-born French artist’s first solo show in the U.S. Le Parc has lived in Paris since 1958, where he became a leading voice among artist-activists and a pioneer in the use of light and colour.
A lot of the time, Le Parc feels more in consonance with certain artists who have not made kinetic art than with some kinetics who have become academics. “That is why I have always escaped those classifications a bit. If I had to give it a title, I am more of an experimentalist artist. Some of the first things I created were from cardboard and a little bit of ink. Or building toys with my brothers to make games we weren’t able to buy,” he says. On display is ‘Continuous Light Cylinder’, in which he uses a painted wood board, stainless steel, motor, metal disk and light. The work transports you into Le Parc’s world and stirs a childlike engagement. One room creates a motion-effect just through the sound and light projected from a point source. It is surreal how light and sound gives you movement. We didn’t learn that in physics class.
Julio Le Parc. Photo: Special Arrangement
According to Estrellita B. Brodsky, an independent curator and scholar, Le Parc’s ethos is to let the public have a direct interaction with the works. “I felt that my role as the guest curator was to have the public understand his work within a historical context and that it is deeply rooted in his commitment to the idea that art can be a vehicle for political/social transformation,” says Brodsky, who has worked with and written on Le Parc beginning in the early 2000s.
In one work, the artist relies on a mirror maze to play hide-and-seek with the viewers, diluting the barricade between the art and the viewer. In most of the works, the viewer becomes a part of the art. For instance, in ‘Partition with Reflective Strips’, a heart-shaped installation of dangling red metallic pieces, the shadow of the viewer breathes life into the piece, erasing the line between perception and participation.
‘Red Sphere’ Photo: Special Arrangement
Destabilising the individual’s optical perception reassesses her social space. ‘Continuel Mobile’, 1963, floods the room with light encompassing the visitor; his most recent work ‘Red Sphere’, colours the floor and walls with shards of diamond-shaped red shadows. The art creates a participatory social space in which the elements interact with the viewer either through optical perception or physically, with moving pieces and games.
Stepping out of Le Parc’s show is like stepping out of a 4D roller coaster ride. Reality seems dull, and we curl back into the mirage of mirrors, the play of light and the multidimensional brilliance of kinetic art. But the results are always partial. “Many times, in my case, there are themes that are realised only to a certain point. There is always something pending. Everything I made during the ’60s, I was able to develop, change and redo. Things that were on the surface, pass to volume; things that were black and white, pass to colour. Things that were fixed, pass to movement,” Le Parc explains.
Phorum Dalal is a Mumbai-based
food and travel writer.
