JULIO LE PARC AND ART THAT WON’T STAND STILL

By EMILY NATHAN

Julio Le Parc‘s “Sphère rouge” (Red Sphere), made of plexiglass and nylon.CreditJulio Le Parc © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris Photo: André Mori

PARIS — The suburban Paris home studio of the Argentine artist Julio Le Parc, widely considered a pioneer of Op Art and Kinetic Art, is a circus of hands-on — sometimes anarchic — delights. In one of a series of rooms surrounding an overgrown courtyard, the artist’s motorized “contorsions” come to life when a switch is flipped, and their rotating arms and reflective metal ribbons refract light into patterns on the wall. Nearby, mirrored sculptures from his “Déplacements” series produce disorienting optical illusions as a viewer moves around them, while the projected-light installations in yet another room create disco-ball effects of shifting color.

“I have never really been viewed as an artist,” said Mr. Le Parc, 88, who communicates exclusively in French and Spanish. “I create different experiences and I do research, about form and space and light. What I do is very different from an artist who wants to create his artworks as unique objects.”

Based in France since 1958, Mr. Le Parc is one of Latin America’s foremost proponents of Kinetic Art, which he discovered while a student at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires through the work of the Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely.

Although Mr. Le Parc won the Golden Lion award in painting at the 1966 Venice Biennale, and has had exhibitions in major institutions around the world, including Serpentine Gallery in London and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, he is little known to American audiences.

That is changing this month with New York gallery shows at Galerie Perrotin (until Saturday) and Nara Roesler (until Dec. 19), followed by his first-ever solo museum exhibition in the United States, starting Friday at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, or PAMM. The retrospective, “Form Into Action,” has been organized to coincide with Art Basel Miami, and includes over 100 artworks spanning 60 years.

“For me, the Miami show is a set of experiences that follow one another,” Mr. Le Parc said in an interview at his three-story residence, wearing a blue lab coat and scrub pants on a Sunday in September. “It’s an ensemble of discoveries, sensations, and experimentations for the visitor to live.”

The curator of the show in Miami, Estrellita Brodsky, has written extensively on Mr. Le Parc, emphasizing the importance of his often overlooked contributions to art history. Other experts in his work echo her perspective, and say the new attention in North America to his work is reflective of an increasing openness to global cultures.

“Le Parc is having a real moment,” Melissa Chiu, the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, which has several of his works in its collection, said in an email. “It’s part of the current re-evaluation of 20th-century art history to include voices other than the two or three we find in historical accounts.”

The son of a train engineer, Mr. Le Parc was born in the Argentine city of Mendoza. As a child, he recalled, he was fascinated by the way things worked, breaking open his toy cars to inspect their gears and even making toys from fabric, strips of iron and olive-oil cans.

While at art school in the 1950s, he was intrigued by the participatory possibilities of Op Art and Kinetic Art, then nascent movements in France, and a 1958 grant from the French Cultural Service brought him to Paris, where he immediately made connections with other Latin American artists including Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez.

Along with fellow members of the collective he founded there in 1961, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Visual Arts Research Group), Mr. Le Parc took to the streets with public “interventions,” subversive games and politically charged questionnaires and fliers, all intended to engage spectators. His Op and Kinetic sculptures, which he began to develop in the mid-60s, took on a similarly political dimension by appealing to viewers to interact with them, thus calling the individual to action.

“Julio was working class, along with many of the other Latin American Kinetic artists in Paris at that time, and he believed in art for the people and for the public sphere,” Ms. Brodsky said in a telephone interview from New York. “He wanted to make work that encouraged people to pay attention to their immediate environment, and then in turn to pay attention to the larger social and political world around them.”

Despite the playfulness and material simplicity of Mr. Le Parc’s work, she added, he has always had a sociopolitical agenda, seeking ultimately to “democratize the artistic experience.”

Indeed, rather than define his practice by a single style or medium, Mr. Le Parc describes it as a series of continuing “quests” or “research inquiries” that frame art as a social laboratory, playing down the notion of the individual creator.

Today, Mr. Le Parc’s influence can be seen in the socially engaged work of artists as diverse as Olafur Eliasson, Tauba Auerbach and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Amira Gad of Serpentine Gallery, who organized Mr. Le Parc’s show there in 2014 and wrote the accompanying catalog, said by email that the artist’s work was “increasingly relevant today” as it “speaks to a turbulent world where the lights of his installations become a metaphor for the fireworks of resistance, activism and unstable sociopolitical contexts of our current time.”

Still active in his studio, Mr. Le Parc regularly revisits his works, and occasionally remasters or enlarges certain pieces. Although he does not use computers, preferring to make sketches and then experiment with three-dimensional models, he is a perfectionist, Ms. Brodsky said.

“He balked at showing work in Miami that is not at its highest level of reflectivity, so every mirror piece has to be just as reflective as it was in 1962,” she said, explaining that Mr. Le Parc insists on replacing any materials that have dulled with time.

The show at PAMM is organized by series, beginning with two-dimensional geometric and color studies from 1958. It will also include more recent works, such as the gargantuan “Sphère Rouge” (2001-12), a glistening ball made of red plastic squares hung individually from the ceiling. One room will be devoted to the interactive games Mr. Le Parc began developing around 1964, many of which evoke arcade or carnival amusements.

Strolling around his studio, Mr. Le Parc pointed to a “Surprise Movement” work from 1965, “Ensemble de onze mouvements-surprise.” Resembling a modular credenza, it spanned the length of the wall with 11 compartments, each one featuring a different arrangement of motors and materials.

“Go ahead and play with it,” he said, indicating a console with numerous buttons. Each button activated the contents of a single compartment, which spun, vibrated or rotated in place to create an improvised score of sound and movement. “They all make different drawings,” Mr. Le Parc said. “I might see one thing in them, but every person has permission to see whatever they see.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/arts/design/julio-le-parc-and-art-that-wont-stand-still.html?_r=0