Galería RGR, Mexico City, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Julio Le Parc (b. Mendoza, Argentina, 1928) from September 22 through November 12, 2022. The exhibition includes seminal and recent works across two-dimensional and three-dimensional pieces, showcasing the artist’s dedication to experimentation and research. This exhibition marks Julio Le Parc’s debut in a gallery exhibition in Mexico.
Through his work, Le Parc sought the development and exploration of abstract visual languages. In Julio Le Parc: Visual Encounters, curated by Daniel Montero Fayad, five influential series, Surface-Couleur (1959 - 2022), Lumière (1959 - 2022), Continuels-Mobils (1960 - 2022), Déplacement (1963 - 2022), and Alchimie (1988 - 2022) are on view. They study Le Parc’s experimentation with light and color relationships through complex canvas compositions and acrylic mobiles. In recent works, such as Alchimie 499 (2022), Le Parc continues his work into chromatic shapes, dots, and lines, interrogating color relationships, exhibited at the show alongside his signature suspended pieces of steel and plexiglass. Gathered together at Galería RGR, each series reveals the exploration of the field of lights, movement, and perception, which combine to formalise Le Parc’s status as a leading experimental artist and to foreground the impact of his practice on the development of contemporary art.
Montero Fayad writes, “Much more than any geometrism, kinetism, or abstractionism, Le Parc’s work operates as a technological device by relating objects, spaces, and subjects in a specific moment of perception. He demonstrates that art, as technology, is located between the social and the individual, the local and the global, space and time, the singular and the multiple, the visual and the corporeal, and between the artist and the spectator. Suspending the viewer’s sense of identity, the experience of the works emphasizes the relational logic it seeks to produce”.
Ricardo Gonzalez, Founder and Artistic Director of Galería RGR, comments, “To host such an important international contemporary artist for his first exhibition at a gallery space in Mexico City is an honor; across new and seminal works, we look forward to showcasing the artist’s important legacy to local and international audiences”.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue written by Daniel Montero Fayad.
About Julio Le Parc
Julio Le Parc (Mendoza, Argentina, 1928) is one of the most renowned figures in the field of research, and experimental visual arts focused on both modern op-art and kinetic art, whose influence spans from the mid-20th century to the present. He studied at the National University of the Arts in Argentina, where he was first interested in the relationships between light and form. Immersed in the radical environment of the student movements of his native country, between 1955 and 1958, he participated in the occupations of the Academy of Fine Arts and the reformulation of its programs, oriented by the proposals of avant-garde artists such as the “Arte-Concreto-Invención” movement and where he met the influential art critic Jorge Romero Brest.
In 1958 he traveled to Paris after receiving a scholarship from the French Cultural Service, where he met artists such as Victor Vasarely and other important representatives of Kinetic art. From them, Le Parc extracted not only its formal proposals regarding movement but also its political implications to articulate aesthetic experiences without the need of previous knowledge or any sort of familiarity with the art world. Such implications derived into collective practices of the “Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel” (GRAV), of which he was a founding member, guided by a rejection of the position of art in capitalism. The collective emphasized anonymity and the participation of spectators through the application of industrial, mechanical, and kinetic techniques alike.
Afterwards, he participated in the “Atelier Populaire” during May 68 in France, as well as in various avant-garde, radical publications, anchoring his production – always close to Kinetism – in a social and political commitment that conceives spectators no longer as participants in the work, but as co-authors of it.
Julio Le Parc currently lives and works in Paris, France.
About the Curator
Daniel Montero Fayad has been a researcher at the Institute of Aesthetic Research of the UNAM since 2014 and holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He belongs to the National System of Researchers "Level I" and has obtained the National University Distinction Recognition for Young Academics around Teaching in Arts in 2020 and the "Alfonso Caso" Medal in 2015.
He is a specialist in Contemporary Mexican Art and currently works with a line of research on the history of art criticism in Mexico. In addition, he has participated in various curatorial projects such as …y luego se tornará resquicio and Luis Felipe Ortega (2022) at the Amparo Museum in Puebla. He was academic curator at MUAC from 2013 to 2014. He has taught at higher education institutions such as UNAM, Universidad Iberoamericana, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he directed multiple master's and doctoral theses.
In addition, he has published reviews and texts in academic, specialized, and dissemination journals, as well as in catalogs of Colombian, Mexican, and North American contemporary art. He is the author of the books El cubo de Rubik: arte mexicano en los años noventa (2013) y Crítica de arte en México: 1944-1966. Debates y definiciones (2022); and of the articles, Juan García Ponce: el disenso ante todo (2022); La “ruptura” como una suerte de posmodernidad: el pensamiento crítico de Octavio Paz entre 1950 y 1967 (2022); Raquel Tibol como operadora cultural. Los textos de Raquel Tibol en México en la cultura 1956-1960 (2020).
