胡里奥·莱·帕尔克 Julio Le Parc

艺术家官网：http://www.julioleparc.org/

Julio Le Parc阿根廷艺术家当今艺术界一位颇具影响力的艺术家，作为60年代发起的艺术视觉研究小组主要成员之一，胡里奥•莱• 帕尔克致力于用一种简单材料，通过光、运动、空间和视觉的共同组合，打破对物质和空间的习惯思维定式，从而带给观众完全不同的感受。

他曾于1966年获第33届威尼斯双年展绘画大奖，并作为一位人权主义捍卫者与拉美地区的独裁统治进行了无畏的斗争，被称为国际反法西斯艺术游击队员。

作为一位长期生活于巴黎的艺术家，Julio Le Parc的名字在巴西也一样为众人熟知，他的作品参加过在1957年和1967年的第4和第9次“圣保罗双年展”。并在里约热内卢举办过大型回顾展，现在。最近的这次展览在座落于巴西圣保罗的大竹富江艺术馆(InstitutoTomieohtake)举办，作品由艺术家和他的儿子协作完成，为黑暗背景中的虚拟现实动力动画。

Paris-based, Argentinean artist Julio Le Parc is a familiar name in Brazil, where he participated in the 4th and 9th editions of the São Paulo Biennial, in 1957 and 1967, respectively, and boycotted the 1969 edition over intensifying political repression. Still, a large-scale Brazilian retrospective did not come until 2014, at the now-defunct Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro. It has now been followed by ‘Form in Action’ at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, which presents works Le Parc produced between 1958 and 2013, ranging from his early geometric studies to light-infused labyrinthine installations.

The exhibition opens with ink and gouache paintings on cardboard: experiments of circles and squares, which create the illusion of a three-dimensional rhythmic movement across a flat surface. The shapes in No. 9 development of circles and square (1958), for example, toy with states of perceptual transition, and confers on the viewer a kind of hallucinatory semi-authorship, by appearing to shift in ways that vary from eye to eye.

In a dark, chapel-like gallery, Le Parc’s 1974 magnum opus, Long march, comprises 10 canvases painted with 14 colours in meandering stripes that allow for the widest possible chromatic variation. They seem to float on their canvases, hung in an illuminated curve, to transcendental effect. The following galleries affirm Le Parc’s status as a pioneer of kinetic art, with works such as Projection Circle (1968) and Continuous light on ceiling (1963), a constellation of mirror fragments suspended from the ceiling, reflecting light in endlessly shifting patterns.

In the exhibition’s final gallery – a so-called ‘game room’ – visitors are invited to engage with three interactive sculptures, and create a distorted self-portrait by activating a vibrating mirror (Mirror in Vibration, 1965), press buttons to flip ping pong balls in vertical and wall-mounted cases (3 games with ping pong balls, 1965),   or switch on a fan that lets white ribbons fly in a fan’s breeze. These works are paired with Investigation game, Twelve glasses for Another Vision (1966), colour plastic eyewear with mounted mirrors that entrance their wearer with abstract, geometrical projections which recall Lygia Clark’s later Diálogo. Óculos, (1968). While Clark’s work was meant to be experienced in pairs, Le Parc’s spectacles are a solitary pleasure. This distinction hints at a curatorial impasse. The exhibition’s curator, Estrelita Brodsky, has framed Le Parc’s legacy as the forerunner of relational aesthetics; but while Le Parc’s sculptures rightfully dismantle the static, autonomous status of the art object by requiring audience interaction, that interaction is prescribed by the simple interface of a push-button. The political, collectivist implications of Le Parc’s work remains veiled here, given the absence of his important writing on the realities of artistic practice and political upheaval in Latin America between 1960 and 1980 – though a few texts have been reproduced in an accompanying catalogue.

In parallel to ‘Form in Action’, Galeria Nara Roesler has mounted ‘9+3+RV’, an exhibition of nine recent paintings, three sculptures and a virtual reality environment produced by the artist in collaboration with his son, Juan Le Parc. The paintings recall the preparatory drawings for Le Parc’s ‘Alchemie’ series (1950-1980), some of which appear at Instituto Tomie Ohtake. In these later paintings, completed between 2016 and 2017, the colourful magazines of a paint gun, released in spirals, circles and triangles on canvases primed with black, create pointillist Platonic shapes that appear to float in outer space. The juxtaposition of bright hues with a dark background creates a sense of dissolution that climaxes in the VR animation, Alchimie virtuel (2016). Geometric forms – cubes, disks and columns – composed of differently sized ‘tropical snowballs’ in the artist’s hallmark 14  colours fly towards your immersed eyeballs, inducing vertigo. With his VR work, Le Parc – an instigator of the light and kinetic experiments of the 1960s – succeeds at transmitting his paintings into simulated space.

Julio Park, ‘Form in Action’ runs at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake until 25 February and ‘9+3+RV’ runs at Galeria Nara Roesler until 3 February.

_{Main image: Installation view, Julio Le Parc, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy: Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo}

Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo