Carlos Cruz-Díez, Color Theorist

The historical workshop is still there, in Rue Pierre-Semard, Paris IXe. There is a crossed-out sign advertising a butcher selling tripe and poultry, recalling the location’s former function. The Caracas-born artist adopted it as early as 1960, when he moved permanently to Paris to bring his ideas and “debates with the people of the world who were then in the capital.” A few years later, he might have chosen New York, but when he first came to Paris with his wife in 1955, the French capital was still the center of the art world. Almost sixty years later, the studio is dedicated to the technical experiments of the maestro, as he is called here. It even had to be extended, first with two spaces in the courtyard for production and restoration, and, in the last two years, in a new location further north. For the Cruz-Díez venture mobilized a lot of people around him: two for restoration, around ten for production and another ten for documentation and communications, without counting those in the foundation…