Artists: Julio Le Parc
Continuel lumi_re mobile (Continuous Moving Light) of 1960-1966 is a mobile structure consisting of a cascade of round stainless steel mobile circles which generate a myriad of twinkling lights around the space when hit by a directed light. The movement of the steel discs is induced by air, producing a dream-like environment where one can immerse oneself completely in the blacked out space of the gallery devoid of any other visual stimulation.
In the nearly 1960s Julio Le Parc began working in a series of works employing reflective surfaces such as glass mirrors - that he would later replace by stainless steel - and would invent playful devices such as special shoes, unstable surfaces to walk on and sets of glasses to produce psychedelic vision -Lunettes pour une vision autre - that he would present in galleries as tools to induce perceptual experiences. Those early experiments, first presented in Buenos Aires at the Instituto Di Tella 'Experiences' exhibition of 1967 were geared to engage the spectator's body and mind in an active manner with the work, a paramount principle that was first articulated in the 1960s, and has become a prevalent ethos in most contemporary art practise since then.
In 1940s Buenos Aires, Julio Le Parc was a student of Lucio Fontana at the Fine Art School Manuel Belgrano. Fontana was by then devising his Spatialist theory of which Manifesto Blanco is one of Latin America's foremost theoretical contributions. In that period, he was advocating for an art made with the help of scientists, whose research should be directed'...towards the discovery of the luminous and malleable substances and the sound- producing instruments which will make possible the development of tetra dimensional art'.
It was against this intellectual backdrop that Julio Le Parc was initiated in art experimentation with non conventional materials and notions such as kineticism and perceptualism began to develop.
Le Parc is also an accomplished theorist and thinker who wrote a body of manifestos on the role of art in society. These manifestos could be seen as decisive to the development of formal developments of art since the 1960s, such as installation art, interactivity and relational aesthetics as well as barometers of the importance of activism and political engagement of artists in the world at large.
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Continuel lumi_re mobile / Continuous Moving Light
1960 - 1966 Dimensions variable
Courtesy of Daros Latinamerica, Switzerland
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