The Julio Le Parc retrospective London’s Tate Modern “plunges” you into 1960s Paris, and it’s “riotous good fun”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.
Le Parc was born in Argentina in 1928 and moved to France 30 years later, arriving in Paris as a refugee from his home country’s military dictatorship. There, he established a collective that sought to “subvert high culture with democratic play” and to fill the city’s – as he thought – dull museums “with noise and action”.
He created sculptures out of random objects: “bicycle spokes, a fan belt, geometric cut-outs, wobbly platters”. Often, the audience can participate, by pushing buttons that trigger his creations into activity – for he believed that looking at art should not be a passive experience. Some of his sculptures are reminiscent of cool 1960s abstract painting but more entertaining: “as if Bridget Riley had got fed up composing her optically confounding art and decided to open a funfair”.
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Le Parc died, aged 97, just weeks before the opening of this fabulous exhibition, which is full of his “kinetic sculptures”: “miracles in light, creating impossible spatial illusions”. They use light, movement and mirrored surfaces to create shapes that “multiply, then vanish before, or rather inside, your eyes”.
“Everything in this show is just waiting to spring into life,” said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Even Le Parc’s fairly conventional early paintings are more sophisticated than they look. One 1959 composition initially “resembles nothing so much as a gingham tablecloth” but fast reveals itself to be a dazzling optical illusion.
But the “immersive installations” Le Parc made as a member of the “Grav” collective are far more interesting: 1962’s “awesome” “Continual Light Cylinder”, for instance, is a choreography of “prisms, mirrors, rotators” and lightbulbs that creates “a continuously changing aurora of mesmerising light in an enormous circle”.
It’s all great until we reach the last room, which sadly descends into “kitsch” – “all airbrushed rainbows and prisms, like prog rock album covers from the 1970s”.
At its best, Le Parc’s work is touched “with futuristic grace”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph, while also “seeming retro, as evocative of a specific historical moment as, say, a miniskirt or a lava lamp”. One installation creates “wispy, silvery reflections” from hanging metal squares; in another, constantly moving strands of white light are projected so as to resemble a close-up of “a gigantic clock face”.
Le Parc’s art isn’t always charming, and can at times feel “unsettling” and “aggressive”, but it’s rarely “slight”: his aim was never merely to “distract frazzled minds or dupe the eye”. Instead, he sought to create “a sense of poetry via mechanical means”. “This show is less fun-house, more laboratory of ideas.”
Tate Modern, London SE1. Until 3 May 2027.
