The Many Faces of Innovation

As a member of Los Disidentes, Otero contributed to the group’s inaugural manifesto written in 1950. The artists outright rejected what they perceived to be an antiquated vision of artistic production and instead proposed to look to a new future:

“We are against that which to us seems retrogressive or stationary, against that which has a false function […] ‘NO’ to the false Salons of Official Art. ‘NO’ to that anachronistic archive of anachronism called the Museum of Fine Arts. ‘NO’ to the School of Plastic Arts and its promotion of false Impressionists. ‘NO’ to those national and foreign artmongers’ exhibitions that number in the hundreds each year at the Museum.”

Vidal was the co-founder of the arte generativo group established in 1960 with Eduardo Mac Entyre. The group’s artistic philosophy was influenced by mathematics and physics and followed the idea that the interplay of line, geometric form, and color would produce art that generates perceived motion. Arte generativo, thereby, transforms the two-dimensional plane into a space of continual movement through the optical regeneration of forms. Vidal’s style began to evolve over time and by the 1970s and 1980s, his work took on a stronger interest in the effects of light across bands of color. His once rigid geometric shapes began to take on more fluid forms, as exemplified by Comenzando lo irreconocible.

With the first ever exhibition of arte generativo, held in 1960 at the Galeria Peuser in Buenos Aires, both Mac Entyre and Vidal contributed to a growing tendency in Argentine art to explore movement and perception through geometric abstraction. Their artistic philosophy spoke to the automatic regeneration of form that creates a sense of movement. Like Los Disidentes, who were known as both artists and theorists, the arte generativo group wrote their own manifesto through which they clearly established an autonomous aesthetic and identified the theoretical principals upon which their art would be analyzed. These artists, therefore, positioned themselves as innovators and inventors of new art forms.

Of all of Venezuela’s kinetic artists, Soto was perhaps the most experimental in the media and methods he utilized to expand the possibilities of art beyond a two-dimensional surface. Beginning in the 1950s through the 1960s, the artist started to regularly employ wire over canvas or layered sheets of transparent and colored plexiglass that produced the optical illusion of movement and vibration through the superimposition of line and geometric form. His interest in industrial and synthetic materials and exploration of spaces that manipulate perception later translated to sculptural, immersive works called the Penetrables— the first of which was produced in Caracas in 1968. These monumental cube-like installations, composed of flexible nylon tubes, allowed the viewer to enter and move through the work of art in such a way that directly translated Soto’s earlier exploration of movement and vibration through geometric form into real life.

The artist’s awareness of the inescapabilty of the technological age is apparent as one reads from the “Generative Art Manifesto” (1960) written by Mac Entyre and Miguel Ángel Vidal. The coexistence of art and technology, therefore, became central to the Mac Entyre’s artistic project. Their manifesto reads, “It is also unquestionable that this kind of painting identifies itself with more technological terms created in the times in which we live, and that it would be illogical to try to escape from. Nonetheless, rather than try to evade the technological age, it is far more important to engender beauty within it, as these artworks produce STRENGTH and ENERGY as well.”

Soto wrote extensively on his own approach to art production. He states in regards to transparency and the use of acrylic sheets, “I wanted to activate the serial lines, to incorporate time and movement into the work in a new way. I found the solution by superimposing two painted surfaces: one opaque and one transparent, with a few inches separating them. I was able to incorporate into the work the space created by the two separate planes, and to solicit the viewer’s participation whose movement in front of the work would activate it.”

As a member of the arte generativo group with Vidal and Mac Entyre, Brizzi contributed to the ongoing discussion about the role of the contemporary artist to adapt to the world in which they live and to contribute to further progress through their art. The art critic Basilio Uribe writes in reference to Brizzi, “artists have an obligation to their era, and one of the strongest characteristics of our time is access to technology, which translates to new materials.” Brizzi himself not only experimented with the regeneration of geometric form through his compositions on paper and canvas, but also produced sculptural works in plexiglass and laminated acrylic.

A Hungarian-born French artist, Vasarely is one of the leading international pioneers of op-art. His artwork was composed of intricate and precise intersections of line and contrasting color that created spatial illusion and depth. He became part of a transatlantic exchange between European and Venezuelan artists through his involvement in Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s project to renovate the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas (1944-70) into an architectural complex that transformed the campus into a symbol of modernity and urban planning. Vasarely joined a group of European, American, and Venezuelan artists, including Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Antoine Pevsner, Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Mateo Manaure, that contributed to the public artworks program for Villanueva’s now iconic campus.

Central to Soto’s approach, was the superimposition of different planes of line or geometric form on top of each other as to create a sense of separation that would produce several levels of depth on the surface of the work. The effect of these overlaid planes was the optical impression of movement or vibration as the viewer shifted their position in relation to the work of art. Soto shattered the boundaries of kinetic art in the 1970s as he began to create monumental, three-dimensional installations that transformed lived space into one of his kinetic artworks. The artist soon gained international recognition as a pioneer in transforming a work of art into an experiment in innovation that activates the viewer and alters their own sense of space.

Beyond his own exploration of industrial materials, what makes Cruz-Diez’s contributions to Op and Kinetic art so singular, is his unique understanding of color and color-theory. This mastery of color and understanding of the ways in which contrasting hues can produce optical effects or create the illusion of spatial depth was defined by a strong foundation in the science of color and perception. Mathematics, chemistry, and color-theory became central to the artist’s process. He explains, “I tried to combine all my artistic knowledge and the information on the simple phenomenon already studied in chemistry, physics, and optics, to elaborate a platform of work that I’ve tried to develop over the years under the concept that color is an unstable situation in continual transformation.” The artist’s whole career can therefore be understood as an almost scientific exploration of the mutability of color.

Pardo began as an abstract expressionist. Her paintings were characterized by the gestural, dramatic application of oil paint on the canvas that revealed her inner psyche and attempted to evoke a universalizing sense of emotion. By the late 1960s, however, Pardo joined many other Venezuelan artists at the time, including her husband Alejandro Otero, by turning to geometric abstraction. Nevertheless, Pardo never lost sight of her interest in exploring human emotion through abstract form. Through the geometricization of space, Pardo’s work focused on dynamic visual relationships produced by the juxtaposition of color and how color could reflect inner consciousness to the outside world. Her work, therefore, represents a unique synthesis between the compositional elements of geometric abstraction and the spiritual quality of abstract expressionism.

Central to the artistic philosophy of arte generativo, the artistic group Mac Entyre co-founded with Miguel Ángel Vidal, was the idea that through art they could “engender beauty” in the technological age. The cold, rational – at times even sterile – quality of industrialization was thereby transformed into a source of inspiration, and a space through which to create and reflect the ever-evolving quality of a period defined by dynamism and innovation. With the machine as muse, the artists in arte generativo established a visual vocabulary founded on the precision of line, geometric form, and color that revealed beauty in a time of rapid industrial development.