Casting colors at the Cistern
Artist’s optical work dazzles with projections of light cast across cavernous space
Carlos Cruz-Diez’s optical art installation dazzles with projections of light across the cavernous space.
At 94, Carlos Cruz-Diez is not traveling far these days from his studio in Paris.
But the pioneering optical artist was not about to let the unveiling of his latest, largest projected installation happen without him.
So his son and technical adviser, Carlos Cruz-Diez Jr., walked the perimeter of the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern during a media preview Tuesday with his mobile phone in FaceTime mode. He was sharing the scene with the “Maestro,” as his fans call Cruz-Diez Sr., and getting feedback on tweaks he made daily leading up to Saturday’s public opening of “Spatial Chromointerference.”
The latest artwork commissioned by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership for the cavernous former reservoir below Sabine Street gets its glow from 30
projectors that cast moving lattices of light on the 200 columns as well as interior walls, walkways and cubes that float in the watery basin. Visitors are offered white lab coats that enhance the optical illusions as they walk through the corners of the perimeter walkway.
The projections are based on a three-minute loop that continually reverses and remixes. The effect is a little disorienting; the art seems to get into your bones as well as your head. On Tuesday, a few folks prone to dizziness held onto the handrails as they took the quarter-mile walk around the 87,500-square-foot Cistern, as if they feared they might float off into the striped ether around them.
Tuesday’s visitors remained quiet and reverent as they took in the ephemeral spectacle. It’s all-consuming, in a good way. One would have to be very, very preoccupied to think about anything else while standing in the midst of it.
Visitors tour the installation in 30-minute intervals, at their own pace, free to roam the walkways as they please. Selfietakers are likely to clump in the corners, where the vibrating projections are most vivid and immersive.
The jovial Cruz-Diez Jr. noted how quickly the Cistern’s environment forces visitors’ eyes to readjust from Houston’s bright sunlight. Achieving the intensity of color he wanted was a challenge across so much darkness, he said.
Cruz-Diez Jr. has spent his entire life working alongside his father, helping him adopt technological tools that have evolved since the 1970s, when the Maestro began building his own lathelike machines to create artworks with mind-bending properties.
Cruz-Diez’s basic principles have not changed since the 1950s: He experiments with the perception of color by creating thin-lined spectrums that he first achieved with laboriously made slices of cardboard.
The prolific Venezuelan, who has lived in Paris since the 1960s, has created thousands of works during his decades of intense exploration. They’re divided into nine different types of color experiences — Couleur Additive, Physichromie, Chromointerference, Induction Chromatique, Transchromie, Chromosaturation, Chromoscope, Couleur a l’Espace and Architectural Integrations.
“Spatial Chromointerference” at the Cistern belongs to the “Chromointerference” series Cruz-Diez introduced in 1975, using slide projectors with painted slides in a gallery space.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston curator Mari Carmen Ramírez, who introduced Houstonians — and the U.S. — to the Maestro’s work in 2004, explained his theory that color is an “evolving situation that creates human reactions in the same way as cold, heat and sound.”
During the post-war period when Cruz-Diez emerged, Ramírez said, color was seen as something superficial, too tied to traditional painting to be of interest in contemporary art. Other artists turned to light, movement, conceptual work and assemblage.
But Cruz-Diez saw something no one else had observed: what happens in the “border” where two lines of color meet — a situation he observed on the flat, two-colored, square canvases of Josef Albers, which illustrated how color is always influenced by light and movement.
Cruz-Diez considers himself a painter. The revelation that led him to create a sense of motion in his works didn’t happen overnight. But eventually he was building supports with lines of color divided by “chromatic modules” placed at 45-degree angles that cause the color to bounce out into the room, creating additional virtual colors, or “additives,” that really only exist in time and space.
After initially working with canvas or cardboard, Cruz-Diez used plastic surfaces for a while. And when an oil shortage made that too expensive, he shifted to aluminum supports. Digital technology has, of course, opened up an entirely different set of possibilities.
Cruz-Diez Jr. offered to help make the projections fly. The Maestro didn’t want any of that: He’s interested only in lines.
“My father has used technology only to make his work more precise,” Cruz-Diez Jr. said. “All the technology is about achieving a perfect line.”
Ramírez concurred. “He’s an artist. His work is not about technology; he’s just embracing it to advance the principles of his work.”
During a talk last week with Cruz-Diez Jr. at the University of Houston, Ramírez shared slides of two older monumental masterpieces by Cruz-Diez that rival the 87,500-square-foot Cistern in scale. Both were “Architectural Integrations” — permanent building fixtures. One fills the walls of a gargantuan power plant in Venezuela. The other was integrated into the walls, floor and ceiling of a bank in Switzerland that has been demolished, much to the curator’s chagrin.
The university’s massive public art collection includes a major Cruz-Diez, an S-shaped “Physichromie” that’s currently being restored and will be reinstalled this summer within the campus’ arts district.
The Cistern installation is temporary by choice, but visitors will have about eight months to enjoy it.
Cruz-Diez looked healthy and totally engaged on his son’s mobile phone.
“He’s healthier than me,” Cruz-Diez Jr. said. He knows his father’s time is limited but says the artist has a huge inventory of works that have not yet been produced — suggesting that the Atelier Cruz-Diez could be “producing” new work well after the Maestro is gone.
For those who visit the Cistern, his colors may be reverberating for a long time.