Cruz-Diez, Venezuelan pioneer of kinetic art, dies

CARACAS, VENEZUELA >> Carlos Cruz-Diez, a leading Venezuelan artist who won international acclaim for his work with color and the style known as kinetic art, has died in Paris. He was 95.

“Your love, your joy, your teachings and your colors, will remain forever in our hearts,” said a family statement posted on Cruz-Diez’s art foundation website. It did not give a cause of his death on Saturday and said funeral services will be private.

Cruz-Diez developed a reputation as one of Latin America’s most prominent artists in the second half of the 20th century. His installations have been featured in major international art museums and public spaces. His work has recently been on display in exhibitions in Paris, London, Saudi Arabia and Panama, his website said.

“Nobody understood the mystery of color like him,” Venezuelan writer Leonardo Padrón said on Twitter.

“Your work transcended barriers and filled us with pride as Venezuelans,” said opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who is in a power struggle with President Nicolás Maduro as the country endures a humanitarian crisis.

“I’m not from the past, I’m from today,” Cruz-Diez said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York in 2008. He said he defined himself as an “explorer.”

Cruz-Diez explored “the ambiguity of color,” sometimes creating art with transparent strips of material that filtered light and showed different color combinations to viewers moving around his artwork, his website said.

Cruz-Diez studied art in Caracas and, after graduating, worked as an artistic director for the U.S. advertising agency then known as McCann Erickson and illustrator for Venezuela’s El Nacional newspaper.

In 1957, he founded a visual arts school in Caracas and moved to Paris two years later to pursue art. He made his home in France, teaching and eventually becoming a French citizen in 2008.

“Art always inspired me. But in my youth, and I think this happens to a lot of Latin Americans, one feels marginalized, the world of art was always distant for us,” Cruz-Diez told the AP in another interview in 2009.

Latin America was in a state of “cultural dependence” early in his career, he said.

“We went to Europe to look for information. Impressionism and other movements reached us 30 or 40 years late,” he said.

MARY ALTAFFER — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE In this file photo, Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez poses for a portrait inside his Chromosaturation environment during the press preview in New York. Cruz-Diez, a leading Latin American avant-garde artist praised for his work with color, died Saturday in Paris surrounded by his family, according to his official website. He was 95.