R Red

Klein’s close associates, such as Heinz Mack or Jesús Rafael Soto, often realized this either as bas-relief or high relief, depending on the volume projecting from the vertical plane. Wishing to transform inert objects into an experiential medium, these artists often explored variations in tone, light, shade, and depth, and activated novel perceptions, such as the mobility of the viewer, which was often preferred to the simple movement of the object itself. The visual experience defined in this context excludes the complex color variations used in abstract art since 1910.

Seen in the broader context of perceptual, Op, or Kinetic Art, these works are set in the real time and space of active perception, using it in vivo—or, as it were, in the living space of the viewer’s body, now regarded as a wholly separate medium whose very definition is therefore susceptible to modulation, exploration, and questioning. This also allows the freeing of pigmented color from its stable backing, where these “metastructures” (Heinz Mack) float above the material device and rise to the rank of pure, vibratory, luminous phenomena, beyond reach and control.

These paintings, and other monochrome reliefs created under the auspices of ZERO, are open to the gaze as much as they hide from it; they appear as much as they disappear. They resist any form of fixation and, by constantly oscillating, they represent an abrupt break with the absolute, stable, and constant presence envisaged more specifically by Klein. The language they create is first and foremost one of dynamic fluctuation, at heart constructivist and kinetic by nature, consisting as much of a materiality that is deliberately short on artifice as of its endangerment, or, in other words, its dematerialization. While familiar with the cognitive sciences, Gestalttheorie, or information theory—which was then in full-blown expansion—Soto’s and Mack’s works were intended to be immediately accessible to the mind, without the need for pictorial or textual reference. This logic underwent any number of variations, all based on repetition and progression rather than on the classical layout. This relationship between background and form is crucial: in visual terms, it produces an undulating, changing moiré effect that is dependent on the slightest movement in the viewer’s position. From 1953 onwards, Soto abandoned these two-dimensional paintings, which would prove to be extraordinary anticipations of the Op Art of the nineteen-sixties, and devoted himself without interruption to sculptural works, ranging from protruding reliefs of simple grids composed of multiple black-and-white vertical lines to “penetrable” installations. Monochromy rapidly acquired considerable importance within these spaces, as it did in his numerous sculptures in the round, often described by the artist himself as “Virtual Volumes,” which are arranged in a “shower” of colored rods or threads. In these floating, almost impalpable masses, we find, on the one hand, the exceptional simplicity of the material and the elusive complexity of their immaterial effect, and, on the other, the neutrality of monochrome—a single color—and the rhythmic inconstancy of vibration. This is because, for Soto, the experience of the work is never fixed or univocal: it takes place in the real time and space of perception, as a temporal exploration of the monochrome. In contrast to his friend Klein, Soto aimed to liberate color from the surface, no longer just conceptually but in a wholly “perceptual” manner.

Particular influences become noticeable from Soto’s earliest years in Paris, like those of Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticism and Laszló Moholy-Nagy’s theories on light and its transparency, which were set out in the book Vision in Motion (1947), a copy of which Soto acquired during an exhibition by the former Bauhaus teacher at Galerie Arnaud in December 1952, and had translated in full. Soto would also recall the roles played by Pierre Boulez’s serial and dodecaphonic music and his reading of René Leibowitz’s book on Arnold Schönberg[i] in his rejection of composition—the very architecture of monochrome uniformity—and his setting up of repetitive systems.

[i] René Leibowitz, Schoenberg et son école: l’étape contemporaine du langage musical (Paris, 1947), published in English as Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage in the Language of Music, trans. Dika Newlin (New York, 1949).

Soto would affirm in 1974 with regard to his earliest passions.[i] While they rely on systems, the material characteristics of his works seem to alter or vibrate depending on the direction in question, just as much as they provoke movement in the viewer. Unlike the wind in Alexander Calder’s works, or electricity in those of Jean Tinguely, it is people themselves who provide the driving force for Soto, without there being any manipulation of the object. This property of the work, more specifically known as “dynamogenic,” was poorly understood when it first appeared—as it was for other artists, like Heinz Mack, Julio Le Parc, or even Bridget Riley. It is worth remembering that, from the nineteen-sixties onwards, Soto was still widely regarded as the hero of an art sometimes called “Kinetic” or “Op”—what was more, the artist, anxious to assert his unique position, regularly protested against this second label on the grounds that it would confine his use of traditional effects to the sphere of painting. Soto’s approach was marked by what William Seitz describes as “perceptual abstraction,” that is to say, a form of nonfigurative art that draws on phenomenology and sees spatiotemporal perception as a medium in its own right.[ii]

[i] Jésus Rafael Soto, in Claude-Louis Renard, “Excerpts from an interview with Soto,” in Soto: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1974), pp. 26–27.

[ii] These ideas are at the heart of my doctoral thesis on Op Art and Kinetic Art (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2012) as well as the 2013 exhibition Dynamo: Un siècle de lumière et de mouvement dans l’art, 1913–2013, which I curated at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, with Serge Lemoine (lead curator), and Domitille d’Orgeval and Marianne Le Pommeré (associate curators). See Dynamo: Un siècle de lumière et de mouvement dans l’art, 1913–2013, exh. cat. Grand Palais (Paris, 2013).

In the catalogue of a 1969 exhibition dedicated to the artist by the ARC, City of Paris Museum of Modern Art (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), the art critic Jean Clay underlines the profoundly spiritual dimension of the “radical dematerialization” led by the artist.”[i] Moreover, he quotes Kazimir Malevich, because a reproduction of his 1918 work, Suprematist Composition: White on White, an icon of monochrome painting, would have a lasting influence on the Venezuelan’s oeuvre.

[i] The author continues from where he left off in the catalogue of the monographic exhibition on Soto held at the Galerie Denise Rayé in 1967.

More than fifty years before Soto, the Constructivist painter was attacking the theoretical framework that, in his view, governed what was still a very young abstract art. As Jean Clay claims: 

From the radical abstraction of the Constructivist painter to that of the Kinetic artist displayed in Paris in 1950, the question was always how to escape this logic of the closed painting. The work must be “open,” to use the phrase coined by Umberto Eco, particularly with regard to Kinetic Art. Jean Clay seems to find the ultimate embodiment of this logic in Soto’s Penetrables (from 1967 on). These take the form of a shower of thin, translucent nylon tubes, for the most part monochrome in color, through which viewers are invited to move freely and experience continuous contact.[i] Clay presents this logic as a significant development for the “ambivalent space” that took shape in the first plexiglass reliefs of the nineteen-fifties. The visual and spatial impact of the Penetrables was certainly not impacted by the limited dimensions of the oldest works. Quite the opposite—as Clay himself asserted, Soto achieves

[i] Soto imagined an “aquatic” version of the Pénétrables, called the Aquapénétrable, in which thousands of small water jets replaced the translucent tubes. He also thought about realizing a steam version, a “pénétrable en vapeur,” “for cold countries” (these works were never made but their models were illustrated in the magazine Robho in 1969).

This is nothing other than a psycho-physiological experience, pure and simple (one not linked to the imagination), a monochrome weightlessness in action, in a universe crossed by “non-Euclidean” forces that defy the laws of physics and, in particular, those of rational understanding.

But this multidimensional expansion, which some would describe as “baroque,” called for a novel reduction, like a counterpoint, both in terms of color and materials. The monochrome phenomenon often begins on the surface of a canvas, a painted wood board or even a metal sheet. At the same time, through the constant palpitation of its visual field, the kinetic or perceptual monochrome also offers a unique resonance with Goethe’s Trübe.[i] In his writing, the philosopher announces that

[i] This concept may be translated as “trouble” or “turbidity.” On Goethe’s terminology, see Maurice Élie, Lumière, couleurs et nature: L’Optique et la physique de Goethe et de la Naturphilosophie (Paris, 1993).

As Maurice Élie reminds us, Goethe studies these troubled milieux in the chapter of the Theory of Colors that discusses the “first class” physical colors, that is to say, those formed by blending light and darkness through the mist, steam, or smoke. Thanks to its status as an intermediary milieu, Trübe is transparency and opacity in equal measure. It can describe a phenomenon of balance between being and nothingness, between the vibrating unity of the light-color field and the chaotic movement of its elements. Numerous works emerging from this dynamic reading of monochrome also bring together the atmospheric qualities of the diaphanous, as described by Aristotle in his Meteorology: “so too, the sun appears red through smoke and mist.”[i] Also, in his Parva naturalia, the same author gives an early indication of the quality of this luminous-chromatic presence, at once floating, indirect, and corporeal:

[i] Aristotle, Petits traités d’histoire naturelle (Paris, 1965), p. 14.

For Soto, color alone only appears through its indeterminate diffusion, in which the gaze is immersed. On the other hand, in a way that prefigures Soto’s reliefs, volumes, and other “Penetrables,” the painter Franz Marc associates some optical discoveries with art in his Aphorisms (1914), and foresees in the modern gaze a similar capacity to penetrate the visible, even if it were totally material and opaque:

These ambulatory environments reveal Soto’s choice to give preference to a free field of vision and wandering; the viewer, like an actor without a script or a dancer without a choreography, is lost—at least insofar as he finds himself sensorially and socially present, although forgotten by the object-painting.

The works can become disconcerting, as minimalist in their production as they are elusive when seen in vivo.The eye—and sometimes also the body, when regarding one of Soto’s Penetrables, for example—is subtly trapped and can wander endlessly in atomized spaces, constantly oscillating between volume and plane, object and image. By invading our perceptive space without ever allowing itself to be fully grasped, a ZERO monochrome, as Henri Bergson would say, is an object never seen in its entirety, now or in the future, by anyone. Whether in the form of a mural relief, a sculpture in the round, or even an environment, this monochrome staccato provides us with a singular experience, renewed on each contemplation: a realization of incompleteness, a space–time continuum that words and images will always fail to capture.

On his visiting card, Heinz Mack presents himself as a “sculptor and painter.” The order is important: the modulation of matter in space takes precedence over the creation of images on the painted surface. In other words, even the canvases that the artist stretches over frames from the mid-nineteen-fifties onwards are covered with abundant pasted materials, bringing them closer to this intermediary domain in the history of art, namely relief, midway between painting and sculpture. Their appearance offers an incessant play of perception with light and real space. The matter appears to be literally consumed by the play of reflection, and the work only exists in the double movement of appearing and disappearing. It is a paradox, one that is inseparable from the history of kinetics and perceptual art, in which Mack played a central part, between the evidence of the material fact and its complex effects. A similar tension applies to the artist’s career, which cannot be adequately approached either from a fixed viewpoint or from a central perspective.

The lyrical abstraction that Mack came closer to in the early nineteen-fifties seemed to him to be overly indebted to the history of painting through its lively polychromy and its supposedly “free” gestures. For most of the artists who were members of ZERO, the twin questions of relief and the “ideal monochrome” form a constant refrain. For his part, Mack aimed to use color alone in space and real time. In other words, Mack goes back to the oldest definition of the term “grisaille,” starting with one color at a time—preferably white, black, or grey, alternately and using different repeated patterns—but without simulating relief in an illusionist manner, using the tools of perspective (Structure Dynamic Blanc, 1958), as well as, more rarely, other colors like red (Untitled, 1957–58), blue (Vibration in Blue, 1959), and halftones (Untitled, 1957–58). His aesthetic project in 1958 was extremely precise: “I give vibration to a color, i.e., I give the color a structure or I give it shape. Whatever happens, one can no longer talk of creating a form in the classic sense of the term.”[i]

[i] Heinz Mack, “Die neue dynamische Struktur,” in ZERO 1, eds. Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (Düsseldorf, 1958), n.p.

In Mack’s Metallreliefs (Metal Reliefs) and Lichtreliefs (Light Reliefs), the constant dialectic between order and chaos, the gridded and the diaphanous, matter and light, is resolutely abstract. These works, like the Sandreliefs (Sand Reliefs), echo the activity of the natural elements of light, wind, and rain on the surfaces of water or deserts. The link between Heinz Mack and Yves Klein is fundamental here. Their meeting, in 1956, led to a deep friendship and numerous collaborations that only came to an end with Klein’s death in April 1962. The latter’s contribution to the history of the monochrome, now tragically over, was recognized early. As for Mack’s exactly contemporary, but also clearly distinct, contribution, it would remain underestimated for many years in the history of the genre. In his black paintings, where the matter plays with light, as in Untitled (1957–58), for example, Mack was keen to integrate the variation of a repetitive rhythm into the paint layer. Like a contretemps, numerous accidents and other irregularities also help to create what is a real staccato effect—unlike with Klein, who preferred a form of contemplative continuity. Multiple microbreaks result from the free realization that Mack thought necessary in order to avoid ornament. Moreover, not far from this radical series—which announces Pierre Soulages’s Outrenoir series, or is perfectly contemporary with it—are Mack’s Sandreliefs. Here, the granular surface and the regularity of the alternating hollows and crests are produced using a simple stylus or notched ruler—of which the artist made several models, depending on the format of the work and the pattern he wanted to create. These instruments, traditionally associated with sculpture, replace the painter’s tools, the brush and the knife. 

It is not just a fragment of the desert that seems to have been transposed into a work of art, but its endlessly changing appearance.

As well as this subtle evocation of the desert, a sample of which materially constitutes the art work, Mack’s aluminum creations are an essential stage in his monochrome speculation. They are the result of manual embossing, using a stylus and a ruler, with the sheet then attached to a wooden panel to make it rigid. The artist explains:

This passage, among others, reveals the artist’s unusual fascination with light, which Dieter Honisch presents as a protagonist in its own right. Retracing the genealogy of these metal reliefs to Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, the art historian sums up his argument as follows:

In other words, by using a very physical, material, and tangible matrix, Mack aims to amplify the undulating, rhythmic, and vibrating essence of the natural phenomenon of light. Where Moholy-Nagy still conceived his Light Space Modulator (1922–30) as a composed deployment in space and time, Mack pushed his sculpture to the limits of formal simplification, toward a form of paradoxical derealization. The eye is captured by the mysteries of this device, held in its optical nets. It is not only color alone that Mack uses, but also the “non-colors” proscribed by Mondrian—black, white, and gray—which here co-exist with the other chromatic values.

Turning to some earlier works, a surprising drawing on paper (Untitled, 1950), made by Mack during his first year at art school in Düsseldorf, consists simply of a horizontal succession of scalloped lines. This is the first known example of the monochromatic structure that will be developed further by the artist. Through this unusual echo of grisaille, Mack sketches a staccato motif and announces his pairing of formal reduction and phenomenal deployment in a work that is both monochrome and “open,” therefore becoming contingent and dependent on its changing context, whether variations in light and space or the erratic movements of the viewer. This elaboration of a changing appearance is accompanied, in Mack’s work, by a strong resonance with landscape, a quest for the sublime and an undeniable romanticism. These seem to follow in the wake of Mondrian’s early experiments in the nineteen-tens, which led him from landscape painting to radical abstraction, especially in his Composition no. 10—Pier and Ocean (1915). Here, one can see an aerial form with blurred contours, essentially made up of fine horizontal and vertical lines in the sky. This dialectic, between basic geometry and atmospheric entropy, also applies to Mack’s metallic reliefs from 1958 onwards, such as Lamellenrelief, for example, or Das Meer I—Lichtrelief, with its explicit title (das Meer means “sea” in German), both created in 1963. The demultiplication and sudden variations in the reflection of light make the work fluctuate between material object and diaphanous scintillation, taking the motifs painted in oil on the canvas of the Dutch artist to a truly “phenomenal” spatial dimension.

This dialogue between the permanent structure and changing dynamics of natural elements takes place at the level of landscape. However, this is not a landscape in the classic sense, with trees and people, inherited from seventeenth-century Dutch painting, but rather a landscape without landmarks, made up of deserted stretches, whether land or sea, in the Arctic or the Sahara, where the artist travelled and carried out a number of projects from 1959 onwards. The artist uses these inhospitable lands, shaped by natural forces—seas of dunes, glaciers, and translucent icebergs—as ad hoc frames in which to present his works, thus opening the way to American Land Art in general, and to an artist like Robert Smithson in particular.[i] The same is true for Mack’s fascinating photographic collages that evoke those of contemporaries such as Archigram or Hans Hollein. Creating a play of scales, and leaving clearly visible traces of “trickery,” the artist transposes his sculptures into a natural setting, as in the case of Entwurf für eine Lichtpyramide (1964), a sculpture composed of six stainless steel triangles, simply folded and lined up one behind the other, from the smallest to the largest. The means deployed are as derisory as the objective is phenomenal, in the true sense of the word: the light and its reflections are first caught then bounce back off the sculpture, almost making the latter vanish, like the triangles themselves, which seem as sharp as knives and fill the space majestically and menacingly. As he does in his columns, covered with yellow gold foil for The Sky over Nine Columns (2013), or white gold for Silber-Stele (2012–14), whose finely embossed surfaces shimmer in the sunlight, Mack offers a model of dynamic monumentality to the moving gaze. Here, the word “DYNAMO,” which recurs frequently in the titles of ZERO’s exhibitions and publications from 1957,[ii] acquires a particular meaning: not only must the work be “dynamic,” that is, moved by an inner force, but also “dynamogenic,” or in other words visually stimulating a motor reaction in the observer, a setting in motion of the mechanics of perception.

[i] Among the works of Robert Smithson (1934–1973), for example, one could mention Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969). Smithson probably discovered the work of Heinz Mack in 1964, while preparing to participate in the exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (as attested by his letters to the exhibition’s curator, William Seitz, which are now in the museum’s archive).

[ii] See Dynamo 2013 (see note 3).

In around 1870, Hippolyte Taine sought to describe a perceptual fading of form, which is produced when the eye is subject to this highly unusual type of stimulus, producing a dissociation of concept and percept. As part of a study on the visual data of the act of understanding, and having presented a “general law” of attention, the philosopher qualified this effect as “an error of conscience” produced by an “optico-muscular” difficulty in introducing hierarchy into the visual field and of evaluating spatial distances.[i] According to Taine, the invisible and the evanescent occur when the hierarchy of elements in a visual field is disturbed. Continuing his reflections, this time taking a musical score as his example, he described how a musician’s spirit becomes “a black daub [whose] signs have been erased [and whose] sounds alone linger on.”[ii] These sounds that linger, produced by the conscience (yet not acknowledged by it), are for the most part unfocused and undulating kinetic monochromes. It is worth noting that if sounds were to be drawn from it, as from a score, they would evoke the repetitive and serial music that was emerging during this same period. For Mack, sensorial experience is never a protocol, a pure idea. The artist’s desire to translate the dynamization and fragmentation of modern spatiotemporal experience is firmly anchored in the tangible reality of materials, in the countless traces of a resolutely manual and artisanal production process, ranging from the brushstroke to steel cutting. Another possibly more primitive aspect of the dynamogenic quality described above is founded on a solid belief, among these artists, in the transmission to the viewer of the physical action that generated the work. If this visual dynamic dominates all of Mack’s oeuvre and merges with that of ZERO for a short period of time, it is because it emerges from the ruins of the Second World War and is prompted by the absolute necessity to build a new world, one that marks a clean break. This relationship with reality, at once demystified and luminous, questions a modernity dominated by the occasionally overwhelming feeling of intensified social and informational exchange, of an accelerating pace of life. And so, this exploration of the vibrating monochrome introduced by ZERO is essential today because it remains irrevocably questioning, oscillating constantly between immobility and acceleration, materiality and evanescence.

[i] Hippolyte Taine, De l’intelligence, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1870), p. 68.

[ii] Ibid., p. 69.

This text has been translated from French into English by Lucinda Byatt.