Throughout six decades, Julio Le Parc sought to systematically redefine the very nature of artistic experience, bringing what he called "perturbations within the art system." In doing so, he played with the sensory experiences of the public and gave viewers an active role. With his fellow members of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV) - a collective of artists created by Le Parc with Horacio Garcia Rossi, Francisco Sobrino, François Morellet, Joël Stein and Jean-Pierre Vasarely (Yvaral) in Paris in the year 1960 - Le Parc generated direct encounters with the public to dismantle what they saw as the shackles artificial institutional structures. As expressed in his manifesto Assez of mystifications ["Enough of mystification", Paris, 1961], the group's intention was to find ways to confront the audience with works of art out of the museum environment through interventions in public spaces with subversive games, other political cartoons and quizzes humorous. With such strategies, Le Parc and REC transformed viewers into participants with greater self-awareness, both reaching a form of leveling social and anticipating some of relational and collaborative sociopolitical strategies which have been proliferating over the past two decades. Upon dissolution of the REC in 1968 Le Parc continued devoting himself to what he calls "una búsqueda permanent" (continuous search) for an artistic experience ever supposed to dictate an effect preset. Instead, their effort is in order to provoke a spontaneous response from the public. Moved by a utopian ethos rooted, Le Parc uses his art interactive or immersive as a social laboratory, producing unpredictable situations and provocatively stimulating the involvement of the viewer in the process of artistic creation. Le Parc spoke of the dual function that has his work, intervention and critique of authoritarianism, in a 1968 statement: "I seek [sought] to create practical actions that oppose the existing values ... [to] create situations ... [ranging against] any tendency to steady, durable and permanent. "[Julio Le Parc, Guerilla culturelle, Paris, March 1968]. 's artistic production Le Parc evolved from two-dimensional geometric studies, with small light boxes for installations large, immersive environments and public interventions in the street. However, this production has in common a diverse destabilizing central function: cause the individual's interaction with its environment, requiring, at the same time a recognition of that involvement. The work of Le Parc called Sphere Bleue (Blue Sphere, 2001/2013) is a huge globe four feet in diameter composed of square acrylic transparent blue that seems to be magically suspended in the air. The refracted light on the outside of the sphere fills the space around the globe with a vibrant blue. The perceptual experience that visitors have the ball oscillates between seeing it as something that is transparent and impenetrable and at the same time fragile and monumental, something that distorts what you see beyond and creates awareness to be seeing and being seen in a common space newly converted. physical components of the works of Le Parc - hanging sheets of reflective material, enormous sculptures made of transparent acrylic, geometric paintings, light structures motorized screens, distorted metal - are so impressively varied as their own structures. The general made, however, is to create an environment and an impression that change directions and are often misleading. In sculptures such as the Cellule pénétrer adaptée (adapted cell penetrable, 1963/2012) or en Formes contorsión (Forms in contortion, 1971), Le Parc emphasizes the mutability of perception. Fragmentation becomes inherent in the seizure of works in which mirrors, lights reflected or projected, different types of glasses, games and physical interactions confuse the senses. Thus, changing perspectives create an internal dynamism or essential instability through which questions the accuracy Le Parc subjective and traditional modes of display, according to what he writes in his influential text Guerrilla culturel, only serve to perpetuate social structures domination. With the same objective, Le Parc also conducted research into the phenomenology of structures through two-dimensional painting, flat surfaces animated with seemingly limitless permutations of simple geometric shapes. Preparatory studies and paintings, Le Parc reduces and shifts these elements according to a predetermined system to create a plurality of sequential compositions. In his "series of revolutions," as sequences of rotation (rotational sequences, 1959) or des carrés Rotation (Rotation square, 1959), progressive sequences in which a slight displacement of a single element of a circle or square lattices standards makes It is a kind of animation, behaving less like static painting than as a perpetually transitional state. In another study with ink on cardboard, Sur reticle (reticle About, 1958), Le Parc demonstrates how geometric shapes - circles and rectangles - when cut in pieces, can get a mobility that invites the viewer to imagine moving beyond the frame real time and always present, though briefly. To Le Parc, the goal is exactly the question and the restructuring of immediate surroundings. He seeks a full complicity of the viewer that requires not only active participation but also self-reflection. Thus, the practice of Le Parc goes beyond mere visual spectacle towards a physical involvement with this - art as human conception, one that can no longer remain static or absolute. Estrellita B. Brodsky
Press release courtesy Galeria Nara Roesler.