47. 47AR (25599285/1) CARLOS CRUZ-DIEZ (1923-2019) Physichromie N°2818 Paris 2019 signed, titled and dated 2019 on reverse chromography on aluminium, plastic strips 100 x 100 cm. 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in. This work is listed in the archives of the Centre de Documentation de l'Atelier Cruz-Diez, Paris; a certificate from the Centre de Documentation de l'Atelier Cruz-Diez will be given to the buyer. Provenance Collection of the artist, France Acquired from him by the current owner A poet of colour, the work of Carlos Cruz-Diez is orchestrated with virtuosity, lightness and harmony. Free and hypnotic, his creations live on beauty alone. Although apparently simple in terms of composition, his work is nonetheless highly rigorous, since the artist has created a plastic vocabulary of which he alone has the secret. In a dialectic between the plane of painting and the physicality of sculpture, Cruz-Diez explodes the pictorial role of colour. For him, colour is reality. "Movement is a spark of life that makes art human and truly realistic," wrote Ponthus Hulten in the catalogue for the exhibition Le Mouvement at the Denise René gallery in Paris in 1955, the birth of kinetic art. For the young Cruz-Diez, who visited the exhibition, it was a revelation: colour as the only persistence. His tireless optical, chemical, physical and scientific research alone summed up his passion for prismatic colours, an intoxicating asceticism that filled his entire life. His first work, Couleur Additive et Physichromie, was created in 1959. Two years later, the artist took part in the Bewogen Bewegin exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which showcased kinetic works, happenings and films by artists from eighteen countries, including Calder, Takis, Schöeffer, Bury, Rauschenberg, etc.... In 1964, Cruz-Diez took part in Le Mouvement 2 (Denise René), which established him as one of the leading figures in Op art. The following year, at MoMA (New York), he was one of the major artists invited to take part in The Responsive Eye, an emblematic exhibition of optical art. Today, all the major international institutions own his works (Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne; MoMA, New York, etc.).