§ DARIO PEREZ FLORES (VENEZUELAN 1936-2022)

DARIO PEREZ FLORES (VENEZUELAN 1936-2022)
PROCHROMATIQUE, 2012
signed in pencil (lower right) and numbered 9/20 (lower left), digital print on paper, unframed; accompanied by a second, smaller signed but un-numbered digital print, framed
57cm x 57cm (22 3/8in x 22 3/8in) (2)
Kunzt Gallery, London, from whom acquired by Steve Allison, May 2020.The Steve Allison Collection.
Venezuelan artist Darío Pérez-Flores was an Op Art pioneer. Over a long and prolific career, he led sustained research into colours and the optical effects of their combination, in strict abstract compositions, earning him a reputation as one of the pre-eminent Latin American Constructivists of the later 20th century. Pérez-Flores began his artistic studies in the 1960s in his native Venezuela and then in Valencia, Spain. In 1970 a scholarship enabled him to attend the University of Paris at Vincennes-Saint-Denis, where he studied Bauhaus and De Stijl colour theory. By this time the Optical Art (or ‘Op Art’) movement was flourishing in response to the commercial imagery, popular culture and mass-consumerism that had proliferated over the 1950s and ‘60s. Op Art proponents sought to interrogate our response to this imagery by creating affecting visuals of their own. In Paris Pérez-Flores joined the ranks of other Op Art practitioners including Victor Vasarely and fellow South Americans Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Pérez-Flores’ early artworks were generally sculptural, but from the 1980s he began to create paintings and assemblages referred to as Chromatiques and Prochromatiques. Bright and boldly contrasting pigment was applied in thin vertical lines across the composition, each slice of colour either applied in gradient or as a solid hue. Pérez-Flores’ polychromatic stripes were arranged in such a way that they appear to shimmer and vibrate or to catalyse new shapes and colours in response to the viewer’s gaze. Later in his career, Pérez-Flores embellished his paintings with three-dimensional vertical metal rods to add a physical kineticism to enhance the optical sense of movement. Pérez-Flores’ work is represented in several significant public collections including the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Apollo in Lausanne, and the Künzeslau and Waldenbuch Museums in Germany.