This newspaper review, which was published in Mexico City, discusses the aesthetic and technical principles underlying the work that Carlos Cruz-Diez produced in urban spaces. The reviewer notes the dynamic nature of the artist’s approach to color as distinct from the traditional immobility of painting. The article explores the integration of visual art into architecture and the urban fabric, a process that seeks to include it in the history of modern movements, from the Fauvists to Kinetic art. The review mentions the attempts made by artists in the United States and Mexico to eradicate the coldness of large planes, as in Synthetism. While not ignoring technical and formal considerations, the reviewer describes aspects of this kind of visual art that seeks to imbue polluted urban spaces with an aesthetic dignity. The article is illustrated with two photographs: one is of Cruz-Diez’s work at the ABA building in Caracas. The other shows a city bus that has been treated with an Inducción cromática (Chromatic Induction), also in Caracas.       

The author of this review, Alfonso De Neuvilla y Ortiz, seeks to present the theoretical and technical principles that underpin the approach to color taken by Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923–2019), whose work was being exhibited at that time at the Museo de Arte Moderno del Bosque de Chapultepec. The article takes the commendable step of highlighting one of the problems that the Venezuelan artist (who lives in Paris) has always had to face; namely, the fact that his work was judged according to formal and even formalist standards (the use of geometric forms arranged within a specific space), when his goal was to present the viewer with a pure chromatic event: “color-light” that was unattached to, indeed liberated from, any formal relationships. The reviewer—who seems to be more interested in referring to artists and historical movements than to the principles underlying the work in question—claims that Cruz-Diez’s work involves a wide range of “eloquently arranged” geometric forms, when in fact the artist always sought to avoid a narrative discourse and struggled to make the viewer see what was happening between forms and lines; that is, the appearance of shades of color that were not chemically present on the support.  

De Neuvilla y Ortiz refers repeatedly to the geometric forms the artist uses, and even to the three-dimensional structures (that remind him of Japanese origami). An imaginative reading, undoubtedly, that is evident in the variety of compound forms on the pictorial surface and in the number of technical solutions he uses to arrange them in space.

In regard to the goal of intervening in architectural projects and the urban fabric, as mentioned in the title of the article, it is clear that the reviewer associates Cruz-Diez with modern attempts to reintroduce into modern architecture some of the decorative value that the author admires in Art Nouveau, something which has been lost in large cities thanks to Synthetism. His position on this matter is unclear, and he fluctuates between criticism and praise without stating his preferences. The article says that “efforts to imbue polluted cities with an aesthetic dignity are also shafts of light beamed at the complexities of an aesthetic that focuses more on the essence of an artwork than on its existence.”