Labyrinthine Fun House

The Patriarch of Venice could hardly believe his eyes when he put on the trick spectacles at the prizewinning display of Argentina's Julio Le Pare, 38, at the Venice Biennale last summer. In front of the eyeholes loomed shiny flaps of metal reflecting his own disbelief. Argentine military brass, puffed out with pride that their countryman had won the Grand Prix for painting, deflated with astonishment when they stood in front of one of Le Fare's "paintings"--a long sheet of shiny metal that captured their own images, then freakishly elongated them as they pressed the foot pedal that set the sheet in motion.-

Youthful American collectors knew exactly what to do with Le Fare's exhibit when it arrived at Manhattan's Howard Wise Gallery last week. Few could afford Le Fare's larger zebra-striped mobiles or a unit of multiple-pushbutton boxes of "7 surprise movements," but they snapped up his nearly identical, spidery shadow pictures and smaller, tinkling aluminum abstractions at prices ranging from $135 on up.

Cheating Cheaters. As far as the young and adventurous are concerned, Julio Le Pare sums up what is happening in art. How seriously they take him is a question that doesn't bother Le Pare at all. He describes his own work as "a labyrinth, a fun house, a release from the conventional, uncomfortable world." He is all against the high seriousness with which critics and museums surround works of art. "Rather than take my art seriously," he explains, "the spectator should laugh when he enters the room." The cream of the jest Le Pare generally keeps to himself: that his lighthearted approach and kinetic wizardry are based on more than 20 years of training and seven of theorizing.

A machinist's son, young Julio entered the Buenos Aires Academy of Fine Arts at 15, evolved from naturalistic painter into op artist under the influence of the works of Klee, Mondrian and Vasarely. He emigrated to Paris in 1958 and two years later, with a handful of other young Parisian artists, formed the highly experimental Groupe de Recherche dArt Visuel. One of the group's "researches" consisted of passing out Le Fare's cheating cheaters, along with chairs and shoes set on kangaroo springs, to passers-by on the St. Germain and Montparnasse boulevards. The man in the street loved them, though many were a trifle mystified by an accompanying questionnaire that asked, among other things: "This demonstration seems to you a) useful, b) stupid, c) amusing, d) pretentious?"

Fixing the Fleeting. Since then, Le Fare's techniques have grown more sophisticated. He now uses motors to animate many of his pieces, creates the effect of lights, including some that rebound so that the spectator sees himself with a thousand different faces.

Le Pare feels that light and movement are an improved way to convey today's inescapable but often evanescent reality. "Once," he says, "things were more eternal. Art was made to be eternal.

Cathedrals were built to be eternal. The viewer felt himself to be a fixed entity. Today, people feel differently. Fashions change, automobile styles change. Everything is more fleeting."

* Actually, the judges gave Le Pare the prize in painting for lack of a better category. In view of the increasing number of works that defy the usual classifications of "painting" and "sculpture," they also recommended that in the future, categories be dropped entirely.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.