Julio Le Parc (1928) was born in the Province of Mendoza, in Argentina, and graduated in Buenos Aires. In 1955, he participated in the student movement that took over the country’s fine arts schools, and in 1958, Le Parc traveled to Paris on a scholarship. While there, between 1960 and 1968, he became part of the GRAV, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel [Experimental Visual Arts Research Group], which, in turn, participated in the Nouvelle Tendence [New Tendency] international movement. He later continued his visual research and production within the kinetic art movement. On many occasions, his positions on various issues from the point of view of a Latin American artist were accounted for.
Juan Acha was a leading Peruvian theoretician who died in January 1995 in Mexico, where he had been living since 1971. In the early 1960s, he was an art critic for the journal El Comercio [The Commerce]in Lima, where he supported the emerging vanguard movements in Peruvian art. In Mexico, he also collaborated with various periodicals, such as Plural and Diorama de la Cultura [The Culture Diorama], in addition to publishing several books that helped divulge his investigations within the academic milieu.
This text was written by Le Parc to be sent to Juan Acha after the I Encuentro Iberoamericano de Críticos de Arte y Artistas Plásticos held in Caracas from June 18 to 27, 1978,whose core themes were: the art world’s current situation; critique, theory, and research in the visual arts; and art’s social context—all of them specific to the Latin American area. This text was selected as evidence of the artist’s point of view regarding said gathering.