julio le parc

The oeuvre of Julio Le Parc, an artist born in 1928 in Argentina, is a pioneer landmark within the context of kinetic art. The first evidence of this inclination was the work “Le Mouvement” created in 1955 and shown at Galerie Denise René, of Paris, which represented works by Calder, Duchamp, and Yves Klein, among others. In 1960, Le Parc was a co-founder of GRAV – Group de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Group for Research on Visual Art). In the 1960s, the heyday of such movements as Pop Art and minimalism, the fine work of powerful formal elegance that Le Parc produced without losing sight of the ethical dimension won him the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale, in 1966.
By and large, the domain of movement in his work is secured by means of a concept and a special usage of light and lighting. His mobiles and sculptures are built in such a way as to allow light to produce kinetic effects. Through light, not only movement but also brightness and transparencies are created that provoke the spectator’s retina in a playful and intense manner. Whereas light is an element overly present in our current day, when the focus is on attracting attention and everything is excessively exposed, in Le Parc’s work light is employed in appropriate measure, with extreme elegance and intelligence. Here, light does not address only the sense of vision, for in his works the general audience is asked to engage in full. His works gain mobility, particularly when spectators move about in relation to their different facets. Somehow, these works present themselves as dependent upon each viewer as a means to achieve the full force of movement; in turn we viewers become capable of transfiguring ourselves through the fruition of the work. This two-way movement is one of the greatest riches in Le Parc’’s work. It constitutes a value of aesthetic order as well as ethical order, while including the Other as a fundamental part of the process. It is precisely in this simultaneous engagement between aesthetic beauty and participation, which Le Parc has been putting into practice since the 1960s, that the singular political character of the Argentine artist’s work resides. Le Parc is an artist whose extensive biography is informed by political struggle, manifestoes, and militant activities that design a life trajectory consistent with his oeuvre of fine and subversive elegance.