To inaugurate the Conferences & Studies collection this book invites us to discover the enigmas of color during the last five centuries, explaining how Carlos Cruz-Diez approached this mystery and, after years of experimentations, he created an innovative approach that continues fascinating. The book contains 36 luxurious full colour images.
Ariel Jiménez is a curator and a modern and contemporary art historian. He is a graduate of the Sorbonne (DEA 1983). His experience as a workshop assistant to Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez sparked his interest in Concrete Abstraction, which he has been studying for the last thirty years, with a focus on its European versions and its development in various countries in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. He is the author of a series of conversations with modern and contemporary artists, most notably Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ferreira Gullar, Roberto Obregón, and Waltercio Caldas. He has published several monographs on these artists, as well as analytical essays on the most important Latin American Concrete movements, such as Venezuelan Kinetic Art and Brazilian Concrete and Neo-concrete art. Among other fields, he has studied the historical and philosophical problems that the use of color obliges artists to address, particularly in terms of its relationship to the intertwined concepts of truth and reality. He has held the following positions: Director of the Sala Mendoza in Caracas (1989-1997), Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in Ciudad Bolívar (2004-2006), and Curator in Chief of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection in Caracas and New York (1997-2011).