For several decades, Paris-based artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, now 90, has been devoted to changing people's established understanding of color. The native of Venezuela explores the magic of colors in a rational manner. Color is not merely used to fill in forms, he insists; neither is it a combination of beauty or ugliness.

Cruz-Diez interacts with lines, space and light in his creations to explore the essence of color, and how it influences people's perceptions. His works always stimulate audiences to experiment with every possibility of color.

"None of my works is done by accident. All of them are planned, and processed in a systematic and orderly way. I don't rely on inspiration, I'm thinking," says the artist, who shares his philosophies of color at a solo exhibition, Circumstance and Ambiguity of Color, at the art museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

On display are dozens of his prints, installations and photos of industrial designs. People may feel being betrayed by their eyes when they shift positions in front of the works.

In Chromosaturations Cruz-Diez set up three chambers, which he immersed in red, green and blue lights. When people move slowly from one space to another, their eyes are constantly engaged. For instance, viewers will find the blue light gradually weakens to almost white if they stay longer; and in the area where the blue and red rooms border, people see a beautiful mixed color of purple and pink.

"We are accustomed to a multicolored world. Our eyes find great stimulus and it's difficult to adjust to a single and saturated blue. While the colors of purple and pink don't exist. It's an imaginary color that the human brain produces to adapt to circumstances," the artist explains.

He played similar tricks in A Bath of Color Sensitivity. Cruz-Diez has hung four huge cylinders in midair that were formed by colored strips. People can walk inside the semi-enclosed space of red, blue, orange and green.

As a young graduate of a fine arts college in Caracas, Cruz-Diez believed that an artist's mission was to realize self-expression. He sought to document reality with thick and heavy brushes, in the magical culture of Latin America.

"It turned out, however, that my paintings only dropped into the stereotypes of aesthetics," he says.

"I don't want to be a craftsman of painting. Without ideas or thoughts to express, a painter can only use insignificant skills to repair the emptiness inside."

In 1952, he read Goethe's Theory of Colors, which aroused his early interest in the science of color. He found that color was a stimulating approach to perceive reality that he'd like to dig further into it.

In the following years he lived and worked between Paris and Caracas, exploring the relationships among colors, space, light and viewers' perceptions.

"Carlos Cruz-Diez is a thinker in the study of color," says CAFA's vice-president Xu Bing. "He has never stopped proving to the public one fact: That color autonomously exists and revolves without any support. With a scientific and rigorous attitude, he always challenges people's understanding of color."

He hopes the exhibition can inspire exchanges between Oriental and Western cultures.

"Black and white are the two most important colors in traditional Chinese art, while in my art research, all colors are equally important," Cruz-Diez says. "I wish Chinese audiences could feel in my works the splendor of color. Every one of us is a presenter of colors."

linqi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/30/2013 page11)