“Ed è subito sera”. “And suddenly, the night”. Darkness. Black. The verse written by Italian poet and Nobel-winner Salvatore Quasimodo appears like a lightning in the conversation with Carlos Cruz-Diez (Caracas, Venezuela, 1923), a magician of the color. An outstanding figure in the history of art throughout the 20th century, he was one of the creators of Op Art back in the 1960s. His work gained momentum in times when remarkable Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera were taking all spaces and there was nothing but social art. He went against the ide and worked with lines, colors, the ludic; light facing blackness. The joy of living. For a long time indispensable collectors, like Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, vindicated his work, and the optical got a second life. He’s presently 90 years old and knows that the boatman is waiting for him to cross the lake. It doesn’t matter. Active, affable and very lucid – he quoted the Strings Theory during the interview – he’s always in front of cameras, greeting people, signing catalogues. Everybody calls him “master”. He gratefully smiles and flirtatiously stares at a woman that holds a catalogue. “Master, would you mind?” “Of course”, he thankfully answers. We are in ARCO.
Question – What are you doing here? A fair is no place for an artist.
Answer – That’s right, it’s a place to meet friends. A place to watch what is currently being done. The funny thing is that fairs were made up by art dealers and there was no space for artists. Maastricht, Basel, Paris… they were aimed at gallery owners. Collectors joined the list step by step and then the creators came. Nowadays, it’s an event for everybody. It’s very positive.
Q – But now it looks like money ruling art.
A – It not only rules art, but everything. There has never been so much money floating on the planet, which doesn’t entail that social inequalities are gone. There is a lot of money and art is one of its safe ports. It has always been like that. The more demand, the more merchandise. Fortunately, history puts it away. Because time is the greatest enemy of artists. Prevailing throughout time. That’s the gist.
Q – But you are running out of time. How is your relation with death?
A – I obviously think about death and I’m accelerating the pace, because I believe that I still have a lot to say.
Q – Let ask you a difficult question: What do you think is the color of Venezuela these days? A – I’m very worried. There is an ongoing change in Venezuela and we don’t know what might happen. I hope intelligence to prevail. It was a predictable situation. The problems in my country have never been economic but cultural. Venezuelans haven’t been taught to think. We act on an impulse. This reality has driven us into some serious problems.
Q – Have you realized that you are going to be asked about policy, instead of art?
A – Yes, I have. But I’m not a politician. I’ve never been into politics. Although it matters to all of us. When I graduated at the School of Art, I outlined what an artist must do. Is an artist a reporter that tells what his eyes see? And I started to make denunciation painting. I believed that I could change the situation of poor people by saying they were. Time showed me that I wouldn’t work. I realized that making them feel my love for painting was better than telling them: “You are poor”. Because there was no way I could change their situation.
Q – Do you follow any ideology?
A – I don’t trust in ideas and religions. Both elements are built on millions of corps. An artist doesn’t have to kill or knock another creator down to be heard.
Q – What do you make of the present boom of Latin American art? Do you think there is an economic interest?
A – That’s a very interesting idea… It’s worth to be studied. There was a rupture movement back in the 1950 and ’60 decades. Artists were looking for new solutions on art because it was stuck in the academy of formalism and figuration. Curiously, the rupture movement came up in normal countries, without tremendous historical events: Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Venezuela. Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador or Peru were on the other side, which have given birth to great artists, who featured a spirit of continuity. Now the nations were the gap was born have gone global.
Q – With all the events taking place in Latin America in those years, why did you follow the optical aspects instead of the social or political ones?
A – Because the political elements were circumstantial and the reflection of art is not. It’s the reflection of mankind, which is permanent.
Q – How did you make up your language?
A – It took years of doubts, failures and readings. Color meant nothing to the philosophers; it was just a banal anecdote. The topic, perspective and drawing were the elements that actually mattered in terms of painting. And I found out that it was true. Fortunately, there is always hope. I always repeat it to young people. We are living a wonderful time to reinvent everything.
We are witnessing the end of a cycle that began in the 17th century. We have fulfilled all economic, political and philosophical discourses. There is a new science, which no longer refers to Einstein’s space-time notions: it’s the Strings Theory (11 parallel dimensions and universes). A brand new invention source for artists.
Q – You paint on sidewalks, baseball stadiums… non-artistic places.
A – I never liked the notion of art as an object hanging on the wall. It’s not like that. Art can be anything that mankind’s intelligence and sensitivity might turn into art. Therefore, why shouldn’t we go for the streets? That’s where we spend most of our time. The street gives us nothing, we get to our homes and we’re empty. The street only brings about aggression.
Q – What’s your relation with today’s art?
A – We are living the end of a civilization and the birth of a new one. The past years are the twilight of Duchamp’s academy. There are three stages in art: people who invent it, people who develop the inventor's ideas and those who corrupt them. We are facing the perversion, but it’s quite normal. Every perversion and decadence is a synonym of progress. There are wonderful things coming and we cannot even imagine them.
Source: El País
