Apart from being one of the main exponents of Kinetic Art from Venezuela, Cruz-Diez is a colour theorist who examined the unstable nature of colour in his Reflection on Colour.

The works by this highly original master are predicated on colour and movement. Closely observing his works always produces a unique experience which each beholder perceives in a highly personal and different way. While his work does not have an intimate quality, it should not be seen as systematic or automatic, even though it has sometimes been defined as such. Cruz-Diez’s art is experimental, aimed at interacting with the beholder, who must engage in an experience in which he also becomes an actor and a constitutive element.

In Cruz-Diez’s practice colour and movement are fused in a single action. Through chromatic serialisation, the artist pursues the stability and permanence of colour. The movement of light, constantly changing throughout the day, and of the spectator in front of these painted metal strips, which Cruz-Diez calls “modules of chromatic knowledge,” is what allows the beholder to appreciate the infinite range of colours.

The practice of this artist has strong bonds with architecture and city planning, which explains why many of his works are part of the urban landscape.

Cruz-Diez’s vision is predicated on eight lines of research that bring to the fore the various ways in which colour behaves: Couleur Additive, Physichromie, Induction Chromatique, Chromointerférence Transchromie, Chromosaturation, Chromoscope andCouleur dans l’espace.

The colours we perceive are the outcome of that process of experimentation starting with the Physichromie series the artist has been working on since 1959 and to which the two pieces in the BBVA Collection belong. The vertical aluminium strips, painted with acrylic silk-screen dyes, are seen separately, fragmented by the sheets of stainless steel acting as modulators of light and of the vision of colour, making the colours appear and vanish from the spectator’s sight depending on his movement.