Le Début Surveys Over 50 Works Dating Back to the Early '70s by Julio le Parc @ Galleria Continua in Paris

text by Barbara Norton

Le Début, on view through September 21st at Galleria Continua in Paris, is a triumph of both artist and movement. Bringing together over fifty works by Argentinian-born artist Julio le Parc, Le Début celebrates illusion and artistry through the canvas of le Parc, a hugely influential figure in the early beginnings of what would become the Op Art and Kinetic Art movements. 

The abstract images of le Parc’s work assuredly reject frivolity—instead, every stroke, line, and curve hums with purpose. Some of these works are rendered on canvas, while others are in three dimensions, such as Sphère Bleue, a large mobile that physically embodies much of the visual movement of le Parc’s 2D pieces. 

Mesmerizing in its mathematical precision and color, le Parc’s canvases glow. His visual dynamism walks along a thin, taut tightrope, baseless but undoubtedly balanced. Le Parc, who moved to Paris in 1958, imbues a deep movement into his abstract and geometric forms. He further liberates this movement with his rainbow of mercury-vapor color. Together, these elements create Le Début—a faithful survey of over fifty years of an artist’s unique visual language. 


Le Debut is on view through 21st September at Galleria Continua 87 Rue du Temple.

Devil In The Flesh, When Op Art Electrified The Film World @ MAMAC In Nice, France

In the early 1960s, kinetic art established itself in Europe with a double principle: destabilising perception and democratising art. Optical illusion paintings, reliefs with light and motion, and disorientating environments shake perception. Christened “Op Art” in 1964, this avant-garde art was met with resoundingly popularity and success, so much so that it was commandeered in entirely new ways. While the advertising agencies, designers and major fashion house seized its intoxicating shapes, cinema gave Op Art an unexpected angle. An art of movement and of light, it was both a predecessor, able to sublimate its visual games, and a follower, which seeks to plunder it through its desire for modernity. From dramas to thrillers, filmmakers and decorators drew a language and themes from it, producing a whole range of “re-uses” in the scenery and the plot – scenes of hoaxes and dread, sadistic characters or zany improvisers, but also extreme experiences: scenes of hallucination, psychosis.

Exhibition immersed the visitor in this passionate story between two arts, punctuated by mockery and misunderstanding, reciprocal sublimation, pop or baroque manifestations as well as collaborations and plagiarism. Through nearly 30 films, 150 works and documents, it explored the origin and the taboos of this predatory fascination, and considers what cinema revealed to Op Art of its own nature. In such, it released the spirit of a decade ruffled by modernity, thirsting for emancipation and haunted by the ghosts of the war. This era, full of contradictions, created a completely new aesthetic culminating in the fruitful friction between the visual arts and the cinema. Devil in the flesh, When Op Art electrified the film world is on view through September 29 at MAMAC 1 Place Yves Klein, Nice. photographs courtesy of MAMAC