Carlos Cruz-Diez

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More About

• Josef Albers
• Plexiglas
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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As if you had walked into a Josef Albers painting, Cruz-Diez's Chromosaturation environment shifts colors with a scientific rigor that yields to fun-house perception. Banks of red, green, and blue lights mingle into gradations of purple, orange, tenuous yellow, and voluptuous gray; the opposite faces of cubes suspended from the ceiling offer stark complements of color, which sometimes become white as the illumination drifts into perfect balance. This light chamber was originally conceived in 1965, after Cruz-Diez (born in Venezuela in 1923) had experimented with his series of Physichromies—3D paintings fabricated from slats of cardboard, wood, and Plexiglas. Opposing colors mix in your eyes as you walk past, a phenomenon roughly analogous to a TV screen's scan lines. This old-school fabrication method adds a charming physicality to the artist's optical peregrinations.
Tuesdays-Saturdays, noon. Starts: Oct. 23. Continues through Dec. 13, 2008