I have visited many exhibitions of geometric abstraction, as an artist and as director of Geometricae, and I have grown suspicious of those that present geometry as a stable language with a fixed vocabulary. Geometry, in itself, is never enough. What interests me is what happens when it is subjected to time, light, movement, perception, space, or the presence of another person. That is why Julio Le Parc’s Light. Colour. Action. at Tate Modern interested me before I entered it, and why it stayed with me after I left.
Le Parc is usually described through a succession of labels (kinetic art, Op Art, participatory art, light art), but none is sufficient. The more one tries to classify his work, the more it escapes. He does not make objects that happen to move. He constructs situations in which the distinction between object, space, light and spectator becomes unstable.
The first room is not the luminous environment for which he is best known. It is black, white and grey: gouaches, inks and paintings from 1958 and 1959, made soon after his arrival in Paris. Le Parc arranged geometric shapes according to precise mathematical “programmes”, and the results, among them Ambivalent Sequences, Circular Translation, Translational Sequence of Nine and Collective Translation, establish something essential to the whole exhibition. Before Le Parc gives us colour, light and mechanical movement, he gives us the possibility of movement. It happens first inside the eye. Some of the horizontal Sequences read like the frames of an animation and run so long that the viewer has to walk sideways to follow them from one end to the other. The spectator becomes the mechanism.
Kinetic art, these works remind us, did not have to begin with motors. It could begin with the instability of a flat surface. Here Le Parc’s relation to the history of geometric abstraction becomes interesting. He inherits from Constructivism and Concrete Art the rational organisation of the pictorial field, but he refuses the static condition that usually came with it. Geometric abstraction is still commonly discussed in terms of composition: balance, proportion, rhythm, structure. Le Parc adds duration. His geometry is not only something to be seen; it is something that happens. A square can be contemplated. A sequence of squares can be followed. A rotating square can be experienced, a reflected one becomes uncertain, and a projected one can lose its material identity altogether. Once the spectator begins to move, the work ceases to be independent of them.
Le Parc arrived in Paris in 1958, and in 1960 became a founding member of GRAV, the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel. For GRAV the traditional spectator, standing silently before an autonomous object, was itself the problem, and the group’s remedy was to activate them. At Tate Modern this idea becomes physical. At first I was looking. Then I realised I was moving in order to look. Then I was looking at the consequences of my own movement, and the distinction between observing the work and participating in it had almost disappeared.
This is most elegant where it is least visible. In the Continual Light Mobiles, such as Dented Squares (1960, remade 2007), reflective and translucent forms hang beneath spotlights and sway in response to the slightest breeze. The breeze is the visitors’ own: their movement through the room changes the air, and the air changes the light. Nobody presses a button. The visitor does not feel they are operating a machine, only that the environment is responding to them. The idea is so persuasive that Tate has let it leave the galleries: a new large mobile, recreating one first shown at the 1963 Paris Biennial, hangs above a staircase on the museum’s concourse, as if it belonged to the building.
The Game Room makes the principle explicit. Buttons are pressed, elements rotated, mechanisms activated, in a space that is part laboratory, part playground. In Ensemble of 11 Surprise Movements (1965, remade 2016), the visitor triggers a sudden burst of motion, and Le Parc’s stated interest was in the surprise as much as the button: it loosens the viewer’s habitual posture and invites a more active one. Museums have historically depended on obedience: do not touch, do not cross the line, do not become part of the work. Le Parc turns these rules upside down. Interference is not a problem; interference may be the work. Watching other visitors, I saw children understand this faster than adults, who began by behaving as if in front of sculpture and gradually began to behave as Le Parc wanted them to. The visitor became a player.
That pleasure is also where the exhibition raises its most interesting difficulty. Le Parc was politically engaged, and his ideas about participation were tied to questions of authority and the democratisation of culture. GRAV’s 1963 manifesto talked of leading spectators out of passive dependency and towards their own “revolution in art”. Yet what is immediately accessible today is pleasure: the mirrors, the light, the movement and the colour are all beautiful. History has a way of turning rebellion into entertainment. When these works were new, the demand that spectators become active could be experienced as a challenge to artistic convention. Today a visitor may simply think: this is fun. Both responses are legitimate, but they are not identical.
The same question applies to the institution. Can an art conceived as a challenge to the museum be absorbed by it? The rebellion has become canon, the experiment history, the machine a museum object. And yet, when the machine starts moving, something of the original proposition returns. The institution can frame, catalogue and conserve the work, but it cannot fully neutralise the physical experience. That may be Le Parc’s small victory over the museum.
The curators, Val Ravaglia and Francis Hardy, work with that tension rather than against it. The eight rooms follow a clear arc: early works on paper, then light and movement that respond to the visitor’s presence, then works that respond to touch, and finally the colour paintings. The show was developed in dialogue with Le Parc, who kept working on its design until his last days. The sensory range is deliberately wide. Tate’s own visitor map flags bright and dim spaces, flickering light, intermittent bursts of sound, blowing air and disorientating floors. In Ribbons in the Wind (1988), fans and light turn a game into a room in which the visitor is brushed by the air itself. This is a show designed to be felt in the body as much as seen.
One thing I appreciated is that Le Parc does not hide his machinery. Motors, metal, mirrors, transparent surfaces and projectors remain part of the vocabulary. Unique Continual Light Cylinder is mechanically understandable and visually mysterious at once: I could see how the system worked, and seeing it did not destroy the experience. The mechanism becomes part of the poetry.
This is where he differs from much contemporary immersive art, in which the software is invisible, the projection seamless and the interface gone. Think of the large-scale projection shows built around teamLab-style digital environments, or the now-ubiquitous “immersive” exhibitions that animate a famous painter’s canvases across the walls. Le Parc lets the apparatus show, and the transformation of perception becomes more fascinating for it. The machine does not compete with the image; the machine produces it.
In Vibrating Light – Tulles (1968, 1981), light is no longer projected onto an autonomous object but becomes an environment. The installation descends from the Cells Le Parc made for GRAV’s “Labyrinths”: room-sized works in which motorised light boxes throw bouncing lines across suspended net fabric and mirrors, and the viewer walks through them as one more moving element. I found myself less interested in looking at the installation than in trying to understand where it ended. He repeatedly undermines the border between artwork and space: a reflection becomes part of the wall, a shadow part of the composition, a beam of light a volume, a moving body a visual event. The building insists on its permanence while the work makes the space appear unstable. Between the two, the visitor becomes the measuring instrument.
In Screen with Reflective Blades (1966, remade 2005), steel strips fragment the viewer’s image while making the viewer part of the composition. This is more than a distorted mirror. It makes self-perception unstable: I do not simply see myself, I see fragments of myself distributed through a system. Seen from the other side of the partition, the same viewer appears splintered for someone else, so that one person’s interaction becomes a spectacle for others. Tate’s wall text adds, with some irony, “or their cameras”. Mirrors elsewhere in the show do the same at room scale. They stop confirming reality and begin producing alternative ones, and nothing is more ordinary than a reflective surface, yet a slight change of angle can transform a room.
The title is more precise than it first appears, because the three words form a chain. Light produces perception, colour modifies it, and action modifies both. The spectator is where they meet.
After the severity of the early black-and-white works, the arrival of colour in the final room feels almost explosive, but it is not an abandonment of geometry. It is the same investigation through another variable. Le Parc began his systematic study of colour in 1959 and settled on a palette of fourteen pure colours, usually used all together and arranged by predetermined mathematical sequences. He once calculated that, at two days per gouache, executing every combination from a single system would take 150 years. His colour is structural rather than decorative. There is a temptation to think first you construct the form and then you fill it with colour. His work shows this to be inadequate. Colour can create depth where there is none, advance and recede, vibrate, and make a static composition behave as though it were moving. The small Post-Image gouaches leave areas deliberately empty, waiting for the viewer’s eye to complete them through the retinal afterimage.
This continuity is one of the exhibition’s strongest arguments. It does not present a great period in the 1960s followed by repetition, but a set of questions that persist across decades, from the Waves and Modulations to the Alchemies and paintings as recent as 2024. What can an image do? How active is the eye? What happens when movement is produced by light, when the spectator enters the equation, when the work ceases to have a stable edge? The forms, technologies and scales change; the investigation does not. That is also why the distinction between “painting” and “kinetic art” becomes artificial here. His paintings already contain movement, his kinetic works composition, his environments architecture.
Some works do belong unmistakably to the 1960s and 70s. At times I could feel the proximity of science-fiction graphics, experimental cinema and psychedelic design. I do not think this weakens him. The dated aspects show how much of contemporary visual culture, from advertising to music videos to digital interfaces, has inherited from experiments like these.
This is also why “Op Art” is useful but dangerously reductive. It makes Le Parc sound like an artist of optical illusion, someone who makes the eye see what is not there. The exhibition shows something broader. He is not interested in deceiving the eye but in making it conscious of itself. The spectator begins by believing they are looking at the artwork and gradually discovers that the artwork is making them aware of looking. This approaches phenomenology without becoming philosophical illustration: he does not explain perception, he builds circumstances in which we experience its instability.
It also makes his work generous. A child can understand it, a mathematician analyse it, a historian contextualise it, and a casual visitor simply enjoy it. That accessibility was central to his intentions, and the exhibition makes the democratic ambition visible without turning it into a slogan.
The installations are extraordinarily photogenic, and yet the photograph captures precisely what they destabilise: a fixed moment. I would move a few centimetres and the composition would change; another visitor would enter and something else would happen; a shadow would appear and disappear. The work was never the same twice. A photograph of it is not the work, and neither is a video. We increasingly encounter art through screens before we meet the physical thing, and Le Parc reminds us that some art cannot be reduced to its images. It requires the body, duration and presence.
Le Parc died in Paris on 30 May 2026, aged 97, less than two weeks before the exhibition opened. I was glad it does not become a solemn memorial; a body of work whose fundamental energy is movement does not need mourning to dominate it. Yet the title is unexpectedly poignant, three words that read like a refusal of immobility, and near the exit a poem of his, “Before…”, does the rest. It is a long list of things he hoped to do before his faculties, his memories and his colours failed him, and it ends with a request that if his hand is found searching for a pencil, it be given one last chance to draw.
I would resist turning Le Parc into a prophet of immersive entertainment. Beneath the pleasure there is a system. The apparent spontaneity is carefully constructed, and the spectator’s freedom exists because the artist established precise conditions within which it can occur. He controls the mechanism so that the spectator can experience unpredictability; he uses geometry to produce uncertainty. That tension between control and freedom may be the deepest structure in his work.
For this reason I would not place him at the margins of geometric abstraction, as an artist who left painting for spectacle. I would place him close to its centre. Geometry is the organisation of relations between points, lines, surfaces and volumes, and Le Parc adds another element: the observer. He asked what would happen if the geometric principle were released from the static surface, and the answer was movement. Released into space, the answer was environment. With the spectator inside it, participation. With light and colour themselves active, the exhibition I encountered at Tate Modern.
I left not feeling that I had seen a retrospective of a historical artist, but that I had been placed inside an argument about what an artwork is. An object, a mechanism, a space, a performance, a perceptual event? Le Parc’s answer seems to be: potentially all of them, provided the spectator is allowed to complete the equation. I came to Tate Modern with years of looking at geometric abstraction as documentation, history and criticism, and I left with a useful and uncomfortable reminder that geometry does not necessarily belong on the wall. It can inhabit space, occupy time, depend on the viewer. And when it does, it stops being something we simply look at.
It looks back at us.