Julio Le Parc ~ Optical Artist

Julio Le Parc is internationally recognized as one of the leading names in Optical and Kinetic art. Over the course of six decades, he has performed groundbreaking experiments on light, movement and color, seeking to promote new possibilities for the relationship between art and society from a utopian perspective.

The artist's canvases, sculptures, and installations challenge the traditional Art Historical definition of paintings: he uses mediums that pertain to pictorial tradition, such as acrylic on canvas, while incorporating formal kinetic processes in the assemblages and apparatuses he employs.

Julio Le Parc was a co-founder of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (1960–68), a collective of optical-kinetic artists who set out to encourage the participation of viewers in their art, in order to enhance their abilities to perceive and act.

In keeping with these premises, and more generally with the then quite disseminated aspiration to a dematerialized art, an art indifferent to market demands, the group showed in alternative venues and even on the street. Julio Le Parc’s works and installations, which were made from nothing other than the interplay of light and shadow, were a direct result of that context, where the production of a fleeting, unsellable art had a clear socio-political undertone.