Transchromie (from the exhibition "60/72: Douze Ans d'Art Contemporain en France") 1972

This light installation, Transchromie, was created by Carlos Cruz-Diez for an exhibition in France. Look at this colour riot! It is as if the artist has taken pure light and divided it into these vertical bands. You can see the artist playing with the process of separating and reconfiguring colour. Up close, the physicality of this medium is amazing. The colour is so saturated. It's like the colours are vibrating and bleeding into each other. See that bright pink bar? It's so intense it almost hurts your eyes. It seems to be asserting its independence from the red or magenta bars that are next to it, but somehow it creates a harmony, a visual chord. Cruz-Diez, like Josef Albers, treats colour as a material in and of itself. Both artists remind us that art is an ongoing experiment, an investigation, and a conversation about the endless possibilities of seeing.