In this article, the author (the critic for The Times, later identified as Guy Brett) reviews the retrospective exhibition of works by Carlos Cruz-Diez at the Signals gallery (London, October 1965), which was directed by Paul Keeler and the publisher David Medalla. This review is of interest because it includes the first European readings of Cruz-Diez’s work, and is one of the few that note the elements that connect his production to Venezuelan cultural traditions and establish its relevance to modern Western culture. At the time, Cruz-Diez wanted to produce work that was “universal” and, ideally, completely removed from any local or Americanist traditions. It is interesting that an English critic should detect a constant in Venezuelan painting (an orderly, refined clarity) that he believes has been there since colonial times and is still apparent in the work of Otero, Soto, and Cruz-Diez. The reviewer thinks Cruz-Diez manages to avoid the effects that are challenging to look at—known as “retinality”—that most optical painters use by creating chromatic environments that are both complex and delicate and are comparable to the elusive rhythms of Venezuelan music.
Following his attempt to draw attention to a Venezuelan constant in Cruz-Diez’s works, the reviewer reports that the retrospective covers a span of ten years, from the artist’s first optical efforts in the late 1950s to his Fisicromías, explaining that the work functions according to the viewer’s movement. He addresses the works from a perspective that would have interested Cruz-Diez, comparing them to the changes that have taken place in architecture, sculpture, and the physical sciences at the time. What is happening to color in modern painting is like what is happening to mass in architecture, sculpture, and physics where the links are greater than inert mass. Freed from demands for representation in modern painting, color can finally be used in all its purity without applying it to an image of the outer world; this is a system of optical forces that have attained equilibrium.
The article from The Times claims that the process of chromatic liberation, which started with Impressionism, takes a step forward with Cruz-Diez: in his work, the viewer’s movement changes the color relationships within a particular painting. A viewer can watch two colored circles making way for a third one (uncertain and slippery) as though it were an intermediate phase in the transition from one color to another. The vertical strips that expose or hide certain color ranges produce, for the viewer, an action in time and a mixture of colors that has never been seen before.