Julio Le Parc: Nothing Stays Still

While in London, I went to Tate Modern to see the Julio Le Parc exhibition, presented in the George Economou Gallery. For me, coming from Greece, this detail immediately added another small but meaningful connection to the exhibition: George Economou is one of Greece’s most prominent international collectors, and it was interesting to encounter his name here, attached to a space dedicated to one of the great figures of Latin American and European postwar art.

Within a few minutes, however, geography disappeared, and I found myself doing something we are usually trained not to do in a museum: touching things. I pressed buttons, moved elements, and walked backwards and forwards to see how an image changed, watching other visitors do the same.

Julia Sysalova

There is something wonderfully disarming about Le Parc’s work. You enter as an adult who knows how one is supposed to behave around art: look, think, keep a respectful distance, and suddenly you become curious in a much more physical, almost childlike way. Perhaps this is the best way to enter the world of Julio Le Parc.

Born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1928, Le Parc moved to Paris in 1958 and became part of the extraordinarily active experimental art scene developing there around the beginning of the 1960s. Today he is considered one of the key figures of kinetic and optical art, but seeing this exhibition, which brings together more than 60 works spanning his 70-year career, I was struck by something else: how contemporary his central question still feels. What happens when the viewer stops being simply a viewer? Le Parc began exploring this question remarkably early.

The exhibition starts with works made shortly after he arrives in Paris, including black-and-white gouaches and paintings from his Surfaces series. Repeated geometric forms, sequences and mathematical systems create the impression that something is moving even when nothing actually is. Patterns flicker and shift before the eye; the image refuses to remain stable. Already here, the viewer has work to do.

Le Parc even experimented with retinal afterimages: high-contrast forms remain momentarily imprinted on the retina, so that when we look away, our own eye effectively continues the artwork. I love this idea because it captures the essence of his entire practice: the artwork is never finished without us.

Installation view of the Julio Le Parc exhibition at Tate Modern, 2026

In 1960, Le Parc became one of the founders of GRAV, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel. The group challenged the traditional idea of the artist as the solitary “inspired genius” and questioned the passive position assigned to the audience. Art could instead become an experiment, a situation, even a game.

And Le Parc takes play seriously. You can feel this in his Game Room works. In pieces such as Ensemble of Eleven Surprise Movements from 1967, we are invited to press buttons, rotate elements, and physically interfere with what is happening in front of us, and that is surprisingly liberating.

Adults start behaving like children. People try one thing, then another. They move around, return, test what happens if they press something again. The usual museum distance between the precious artwork and the careful spectator begins to disappear. But the playfulness is not superficial. Behind it lies a much more serious question: who controls what we see. You move, and the work moves with you. Sometimes all it takes is one step to the side, and suddenly you are looking at something different.

Throughout his career, Le Parc has explored how unstable perception actually is. We tend to trust our eyes, yet his works constantly remind us that seeing depends on light, movement, position, and time. His experiments with light are particularly beautiful in this respect. Le Parc used transparent and reflective materials, mirrors, movement, and projected light to create images that never seem completely fixed. In Unique Continual Light Cylinder (1962–2012), light is transformed by the structure into a constantly shifting visual experience. What we see depends on our position, on the reflections, and on the movement of light itself. The work has no single, stable image: it changes as we move around it, making perception itself part of the artwork.

This becomes almost literal in 64 Reflective Blades from 2017, where reflective stainless-steel strips fragment the viewer’s own image. You are looking at the artwork, but at the same time you have entered it. Your reflection has become one of its materials.

Julio Le Parc with Reflective Blades

More than sixty years later, this might not sound radical. We now live in a culture obsessed with immersive experiences. Museums and exhibitions increasingly promise interaction, participation, and environments designed to surround us. But Le Parc was asking these questions before immersive became a word we attach to almost everything. And there is an important difference. Much of today’s immersive culture tries to overwhelm us. Bigger projections, more screens, more technology, more spectacle. Le Parc often achieves the opposite with surprisingly simple means: a light source, a reflective surface, a moving element, a repeated geometric form.

The technology is never really the point; perception is. This is perhaps why the works have aged so well. They do not feel like historical demonstrations of once-new technology. They still work on the body: you still want to move closer or change your position. You still wonder whether the object changed or whether you did.

Color is another part of this investigation. Since 1959, Le Parc has worked with a system of 14 colors, exploring their possible combinations across paintings, gouaches, sculptures and installations. The exhibition follows this thread all the way to later works, including the extraordinary Blue Sphere, whose suspended blue elements turn light, color and movement into something almost immaterial.

Julio Le Parc, Blue Sphere, 2001/2022

There is a strange contradiction in Le Parc’s work that I found fascinating. His methods can be extremely systematic: mathematical sequences, repeated modules, carefully structured color systems, yet the experience of the finished work is anything but rigid. The artist gives up a certain amount of control to the viewer.

That idea also has a political dimension. Le Parc and his GRAV colleagues were interested in breaking down hierarchies, including the hierarchy between the person who makes the artwork and the person who encounters it. The viewer is not there simply to receive the artist’s message—we are allowed to experiment, to discover and even to misunderstand.

In 1966, Le Parc was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. His works would go on to be shown internationally for decades, yet at Tate Modern, I did not have the feeling that I was looking at the retrospective of an artist whose importance belongs mainly to art history. Quite the opposite.

We live through interfaces today. We touch screens, make selections, generate images, move through algorithmically constructed environments and constantly interact with technology. Participation has become one of the defining conditions of contemporary life. I left the exhibition thinking that perhaps this is why Julio Le Parc still feels so contemporary. He did not simply invent new visual effects; he understood very early that the future of art would not only be about what artists put in front of us, but also about what happens when we enter the picture.

Julio Le Parc
Light. Colour. Action.
June 8, 2026 – May 3, 2027
Tate Modern, London