In the 1960s and 70s, Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923-2019) was trying to reimagine and experiment with our encounters with color. The Venezuelan artist spent most of his career, but was at his apex during this time, reworking and evolving the core idea that color isn’t a fixed object but an event. An event in real-time, in the eye and body of the viewer, depending on light, movement, and context. By 1965, and with the installation, Chromosaturation, Diez was at his fullest, most literal in his idea: an installation that consists of three interconnected chambers—one red, one green, and one blue—that completely submerge visitors in single-hue environments to test and overload normal visual perception.
Chromosaturation has been constructed and is on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and on quiet Monday morning, I was alone in the installation. I had just recently been in Pomona to see James Turrell’s famed outdoor “viewing room,” Skyspace, because apparently I’m doing the American tour of optical immersions. The summer has been rough, what can I say! But I have long been an admirer and curious of Diez’ career, just beginning to understand more and more the South American and Latin American Op art movement.
So in 1965 he started conceiving of something more radical, as part of a project he called the Deconditioning Labyrinth. The question he was chasing: what if you stopped representing color and just let people walk into it? Three years later, in 1968, the first public version of Chromosaturation appeared—a tunnel of translucent plexiglass chambers, each one washed in red, green, or blue, the primary colors of light rather than pigment. You could walk through the chambers, or stand outside and watch other people move through them.
Stand inside one of those chambers long enough and your eyes basically give up trying to see anything but that single color; the room reads as pure, saturated monochrome. Then you step into the next chamber and the shift hits you almost physically, because your eyes are still adjusted to the wavelength you just left. This was my experience (attempted to be documented here, but to be fair, the iPhone doesn’t capture the true color that well). And that was the point. It was about documenting color, it was about immersion with color. Cruz-Diez wanted an experience you couldn't just look at; he wanted your own body and nervous system to become the proof of his argument. And there's a nice twist built into the piece: you're both the one having the experience and, to anyone watching from outside, part of the artwork. Participant and object, at the same time. That I was alone in the space was interesting as I didn’t quite get the added vantage point, nor did anyone else in the museum.
What I understand now is that it's worth placing this in its moment, too. The late 1960s and '70s were full of artists trying to pull art off the wall and into shared, participatory space—Cruz-Diez was working alongside fellow Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto and the broader Kinetic and Op art scene, all of them betting that the viewer's body and senses belonged inside the work, not just in front of it. He wasn't just building a cool colored room, but trying to settle an argument he'd been having with painting itself.
Cruz-Diez kept rebuilding and rescaling Chromosaturation for decades after that first version, and it's held up as one of the real ancestors of the immersive, walk-into-it installations that are everywhere now. And to be honest, it’s one of the best. —Evan Pricco
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