LUIS TOMASELLO (La Plata, 1915 - París, 2014)

Atmósfera Cromoplástica IV-2 Silkscreen and airbrush on board 43.5 x 43.5 x 5 cm Born in Ciudad de La Plata and trained in Buenos Aires, Tomasello moved to Paris in 1957 along with other Latin American artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, Julio Le Parc, Gregorio Vardánega and Martha Boto. Tomasello adopts geometry after his first trip to Europe in 1951. His admiration for Piet Mondrian, founder of neoplasticism, one of the initiating currents of constructive abstraction in the early twentieth century, will make him take from him some elements that he will keep in his production, such as the predilection for essential figures like the square / cube and chromatic austerity, as well as the compositions resolved mostly on vertical and horizontal axes. From 1957, inspired by Mondrian's Boogie-Woogie, he begins with optical effect paintings investigating the dynamic properties of colors. He quickly replaces the painted modules on the plane with cylindrical rods (stiges), initiating his characteristic reliefs. Unlike other artists who try to give a spatial dimension to Mondrian's geometric constants, Tomasello uses cylinders, cubes and polyhedrons fixed by one of their edges, as elements suitable for investigating the instability of color according to their relative position, creating a multiplicity of shades depending on the incidence of the light source. But perhaps, his most characteristic contribution is in the resource of coloring the faces of the bodies, those hidden from the frontal vision, whose color is reflected on the support, creating fluctuating chromatic halos. This is what the artist calls "color-sensation", typical of his "Chromoplastic Atmospheres", in which he has worked assiduously since 1960. With them he joins the kinetic art circuit that has its peak in these years, participating in the exhibition "Bewogen Beweging" ( Moving Movement ), held in 1961 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, joining the Denise René Gallery in Paris with a solo exhibition in 1962. From then on he established himself as an outstanding representative of this trend and toured the world with his work. Multiple on panel, Signed and serialized on the back: "Luis Tomasello 45/75".