Luis Tomasello
White reliefs of small cubes that throw coloured light back onto the wall from a colour you cannot see.
Luis Tomasello was born at La Plata in Argentina in 1915 and moved to Paris in 1957, where he became part of the kinetic and Op circle around the Galerie Denise Rene alongside Le Parc, Cruz-Diez and Soto. His Atmospheres Chromoplastiques are the work: a white panel carrying a regular grid of small white cubes, each tilted, with one hidden face painted in a saturated colour. The colour itself is never visible from the front — what the viewer sees is the reflection it throws back onto the white surface, which changes as they move. He died in Paris in 2014.
A market centred on Paris and on the Latin American sales in New York, and one that has strengthened as post-war kinetic and Op art has been reassessed. The works are painted wood reliefs and their condition is decisive in a particular way: the effect depends entirely on clean white surfaces and undamaged cubes, and a chipped, discoloured or repainted panel loses precisely what makes it work. They cannot be cleaned conventionally. Editions and multiples exist alongside the unique reliefs and must be distinguished.
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