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Lot Essay
Born in La Plata, a suburb of Buenos Aires, the young Luis Tomasello worked alongside his father in construction picking up skills that would both influence him and enable him to assemble his complex and magical constructions of the years to follow. His work during the 1950s exhibits an early interest in a geometric aesthetic but is predominantly figurative. The artist journeyed to Europe for the first time in 1951 and upon his return home met both Emilio Petorutti and Carmelo Arden Quin; the latter, had along with Edgar Bayley, Rhod Rothfuss, Gyula Kosice, Tomas Maldonado and Lidy Prati, published the only issue of Arturo magazine in 1944 considered the founding moment in the development of Concrete Art in Argentina. The movement sought to strip painting from the burden of figurative representation--its belligerent manifesto expressed a new art for a new age and the idea of pure invention and the freeing of the picture plane once and for all.(1)
The artist's trip to Paris in 1957 marked profoundly the way he saw and understood space, movement, and above all--light. Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian became sources of inspiration in his search for the essence of reality--a new way to capture not the fleeting but the poetic quintessence he sought in art. Utilizing the cube as his most versatile ingredient throughout his life, Tomasello would create a way to paint with light and shadow solely rejecting, in theory and material, the painted image and the instruments that made it possible. In Paris, his work was shown at Denise René Gallery alongside the work of Jean Arp, Victor Vasarely and Jesús Rafael Soto; he also became part of the Kinetic Art movement there.
Tomasello's work predominantly is the exploration of light and its effects through the repetition of the cube on the surface of the square or structures he constructs. Through various placements of the geometric shape, he creates tension and movement that is at once poetic as it is an optical illusion.
1) Fundación Proa, Argentine Abstract Art, Buenos Aires, 2003, 12.
The artist's trip to Paris in 1957 marked profoundly the way he saw and understood space, movement, and above all--light. Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian became sources of inspiration in his search for the essence of reality--a new way to capture not the fleeting but the poetic quintessence he sought in art. Utilizing the cube as his most versatile ingredient throughout his life, Tomasello would create a way to paint with light and shadow solely rejecting, in theory and material, the painted image and the instruments that made it possible. In Paris, his work was shown at Denise René Gallery alongside the work of Jean Arp, Victor Vasarely and Jesús Rafael Soto; he also became part of the Kinetic Art movement there.
Tomasello's work predominantly is the exploration of light and its effects through the repetition of the cube on the surface of the square or structures he constructs. Through various placements of the geometric shape, he creates tension and movement that is at once poetic as it is an optical illusion.
1) Fundación Proa, Argentine Abstract Art, Buenos Aires, 2003, 12.