What are your optics? the kinetic gaze of Julio le Parc.
After almost two decades in the dark, the Papesse contemporary art Museum in Siena Italy has reopened its doors with a brilliant retrospective on the Argentinian born artist.
Following a long hiatus, the exhibition on the lifetime career of the renowned Argentinian born op-kinetic artist Julio Le Parc is just the right thing to reboot a flagging contemporary art museum like the Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena. A student of the Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely, and a founding member of GRAV, Julio Le Parc’s preferred medium is optics. Was it a mere coincidence that the 15th century Palazzo delle Papesse, known also as the Palazzo Piccolomini, was once a refuge for Galileo Galilei, who used the roof loggia to scan the skies with his telescope, the optical invention that changed the course of human history?
Formerly owned by the Bank of Italy, the Papesse had remained a black hole in the Tuscan cultural scene from the time it was shut down in 2008. The Papesse had a number of very active and fruitful years under the curatorial direction first with Sergio Risaliti and then with Marco Pierini. I was fortunate enough to have had, on a number of occasions, the chance to see some of these well curated multi-media shows while teaching summers in Siena, and I remember hearing about the kind of conservative blowback the institution was subsequently hit with. More likely than not, these were the kind of pressures that eventually led to the museum’s premature closing.
Video clip: Julio Le Parc, Continuel-lumière au plafond (1963-2016) Palazzo delle Papesse.
To top things off, in 2020 an unmemorable show popped up on Salvador Dalì that turned out to be an over-commercialized embarrassment. So it is fortuitous to see that the museum was taken over this year by Opera Laboratori, one of the major cultural for-profit organizations working in Italy right now. The exhibition, Julio Le Parc. The discovery of perception, curated by Marcella Beccaria, with the participation of the 96 year old Julio Le Parc himself, succeeds in presenting a nearly complete body of his work.
In the name of expediency, I won’t get into a blow by blow account of what is on view, suffice it to say that the exhibition runs until the 16th of March, 2025, and that leaves plenty of time to plan a trip to Siena to see for yourselves. Le Parc’s incredible imagination runs the gamut from eye-teasing manipulations of color to playfully illuminated motorized moving reflective elements. And almost all the artwork runs on an endless continuum: the pieces feed into each other, some are reiterations of earlier works, others are continuously updated, there is no real beginning or end to Le Parc’s visual research. Could it be because a basic precept of kinetic art is to remove the artist from the artwork? to make something windup, or like clockwork?
While in London in early September, I had the chance to visit the exhibition on Anthony McCall, Solid Light, at the Tate Modern. This relatively small exhibition is filled with optical projections that, similarly to Le Parc, force the viewer to interact with the objects, to position themselves in, and around space, to seize the moment. There is an element of patience necessary to stand back, to view McCall’s projected streams of light as they gradually come to a full circle. Viewers for Le Parc’s exhibition find themselves in situations much like with McCall, having to construct their own optic of the work before them.
I regret not giving these visual masters a more complete survey of their accomplishments. Especially since I have a deep fascination with these early pioneers of the kinetic arts, and have been long drawn to their experimental tactics. I became interested in how these movements played out across France, Italy and the former Yugoslavia. Experimental collectives like the French GRAV, the Italian Gruppo T, and numerous individual artists from various Western and Eastern bloc countries contributed to the development of “programmed art” and kinetic arts movements. And its not a far reach to connect these earlier optical and kinetic projects with the contemporary emergence of the digital arts.
Thanks to K. Lampert, M. Köster, and G. Penzo for their insightful contributions to this newsletter.