Mouvement et Déplacement

Espace Meyer Zafra is pleased to present «Movement and Displacement», a collective exhibition bringing together the works of kinetic artists from Europe and Latin America. Although this movement brings together all artists from South American and European countries, there are notable differences between the aspirations of creators from these two continents. This desire to title the exhibition «Movement and Displacement» lies in the scientific confrontation. Movement is the action of moving while displacement is a change of position, without taking into account the action and all of its components (speed, gravity, mass, etc.). 

 

Yaacov Agam (1928 - ) introduced the fourth dimension into art, that of time combined with movement. His painted or sculpted works, always in the process of becoming, favor shape and color in motion over the static and the fixed state and associate the spectator with the work of creation. 

 

In the 1960s, Marina Apollonio (1940 - ) began designing visual illusion experiences. By choosing primary forms like the circle, the artist studies its structural possibilities in order to make the work active. 

 

Like Marina Apollonio, Ennio Ludovico Chiggio (1938 - 2020), obtains different structural modifications of objects by using elementary geometric shapes, thanks to different processes. With the work Interferenza Lineare 14.3 (4+5 moduli), Chiggio provokes visual interference from the superimposition of more or less displaced frames. 

 

The singularity of Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923 - 2019) lies in color and its relationship to space and form. It tends to produce a chromatic climate in perpetual change and to transform the two-dimensional support into an evolving medium. The exhibited work is part of his series of physichromies. They are structures in relief where background colors are juxtaposed with colored strips placed perpendicularly and are reflected according to the light or the viewer’s angle of vision. 

 

After studying at the School of Plastic Arts in Caracas, Narciso Debourg (1925 - 2022) moved to Paris in 1949, where he participated in the group of dissidents bringing together his former classmates: Jesus Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero, etc. . Also influenced by the MADI group launched by Kosice and Arden Quin at the end of the 1940s in Argentina, Narciso Debourg then embarked on this experimentation: the repetition of small geometric shapes, first flat, then cubic and cylindrical, regularly placed on the support of the work and cut diagonally, producing rhythmic alterations of light. 

 

Manuel Mérida (1939 - ) is one of the second generation of South American kinetic artists. Through his work, the artist seeks to avoid offering a fixed and unique vision, playing with the variations of the colored material (pigments, sand, charcoal powder, wood particles, painted metal, etc.) contained in his works. 

 

Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Caracas, Jesus Rafael Soto (1923 - 2005) moved to France in 1950. His ambition was to shake up the notion of a work of art by introducing disturbing elements such as movement but maintaining the frontal relationship with the viewer. Its plastic volumes are designed to transform the human gaze and enrich his experience by confronting him with a new space and some new colors. But undeniably, it is the introduction of movement, and no longer its suggestion, which becomes the engine of his artistic adventure. 

 

Ludwig Wilding (1927 - 2010) joined the group “Nouvelle Tendance” in 1961. It was from the 1960s that he abandoned painting to carry out work on the phenomena of visual perception in art. He then focused on the line to make it his strength of expression and the starting point of all his research. From then on, he only worked as an autodidact without example or model and mainly in black and white. Similarly the work Interferenza lineare by Ennio L. Chiggio, Wilding provokes visual interference from the superimposition of more or less displaced frames.