Dear Shaded Viewers,
Centre Pompidou has put on the first major Parisian exhibition devoted to the man known for making vision conscious of itself, Victor Vasareli. Vasareli has gone down in history as the inventor of optical-kinetic art and for the art that troubles the eye and excites the retina with his vibrant and flickering paintings. His flickering paintings significantly revolutionised geometric abstraction and became an elementary formal vocabulary. This vocabulary was designed to facilitate all types of applications and adaptations from poster to architecture and everything in between. The logo he created for Renault is a great example of his commercial work. His earliest advertising work and graphic studies date back of the 1930’s. This exhibition takes us trhough to the science fiction dreams in his later work. Although I’ve not placed the images above chronologically, the curators of the exhibit provide a chronological and thematic overview of an opus that was driven by the conviction that art can change life, provided it radically changes its mode of conception, production and dissemination.
“I cannot help feeling a disturbing analogy between my kinetic plastic and the whole of the micro-and macro-cosmos. Yet again, my art thus transposes Nature, this time the Nature of pure physics, in such a way as to psychically feel and comprehend this world.” Vasarely
The themes:
The Legacy of the Avant-Gardes
Geometries of the Real
Abstract Energies
Visual Esperanto
PopAbstraction
Towards Architecture
Cosmic Dreams
