Luis Tomasello Jewelry in collaboration with Chus Burés

Luis Tomasello’s work is recognizable at first glance. It is white, composed in relief and square in format; color can be seen in it, or rather, the reflection of color, and forms are repeated within it. A work by Tomasello does not represent anything; it simply presents these projecting elements and this color which is indirectly diffused across the painting’s white surface. It’s what the artist himself refers to as "atmosphere chromoplastique", and it is what he has been working on since 1958, the year after he moved to Paris. Coming from Argentina, his painting, like that of Gregorio Vardanega and Tomás Maldonado, was, at that time, influenced by the Arte Concreto-Invención Group active in Buenos Aires since the late 1940s. However, it was Mondrian’s New York period, in particular his painting Broadway Boogie Woogie with its movement of color and dynamic lines, and the way in which his French disciple, Jean Gorin, constructed relief with colored planes, that were to seriously make their mark on Tomasello, allowing him to find his future direction, from which he has never deviated.

Tomasello’s paintings use a wide range of relief and visual effects, achieved with a highly restrained repertoire of forms - identical structures based on orthogonal grids and regularly repeated modules. Hungry for space, Tomasello chose to move up from paintings to architecture, applying his ideas on a monumental scale. In 1975, he created a mural for the Salle Bleue auditorium in the Palais de Congrès at Porte Maillot, Paris. Made of staff, the mural covers the walls either side of the auditorium, composed of white oval shapes of varied surface, elements from his "objets plastiques" - a cylinder cut at different angles - which affect the acoustics and reflect the light in different ways depending on the angle at which they are inclined.

In 2010, Tomasello moved back down from monumental to minute, devoting his energy to designing jewelry which Chus Burés, an adept at working with artists in this field, fashioned with great brio. Drawing upon his repertoire of forms, Tomasello adapted the same ideas to the proportions of whatever these objects were to adorn - hands, neck, ears, blouses or jackets. They all share a number of points - a use of relief and reflected color, and a repetition of modular elements - adapted to the scale of each piece, within a traditional repertoire of necklace, bracelet, brooch, pendant, ring and earrings.

 

 

All these pieces are cast in silver, with polished gold providing the color. The necklace, for example, is made up of seven hollowed-out cubes, each attached to a crescent shape by one of its edges. The gold applied to one of the inside faces of the cube colors the other three with its reflection. These same cubes, on a different scale, had been exhibited in 1972 as a low-lying sculpture in the Galerie Denise René, and again in 1974 as a sort of mobile sculpture on the fencing of the Fantin-Latour School in Grenoble. The brooch consists of a gold cube tilted on edge in the center of a slightly raised circle, itself inscribed within a square. The pendant uses the same disposition but with a square inscribed within a circle. Tomasello applied this same principle to a large mural made for the gable wall of an apartment building in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1971, itself inspired by his 1967 composition Atmosphère chromoplastique No 178. The same configuration has been used for the earrings and ring. The cross-shaped pendant, however, is different: it is composed of ten square modules that form the shaft and crossbeam, detached from the base which is slightly larger. The red applied to the underside of the squares dissipates over the surface of the cross, as in his identical reliefs in Atmosphère chromoplastique No 372 from 1975. Whether applied to the scale of jewelry or architecture, the elements which make up Tomasello’s art can be seen to work, each producing, in its particular way, its own effect.

With these perfectly crafted pieces of jewelry, Luis Tomasello joins the ranks of other artists who have meticulously adapted their work to this art form, namely Jean Arp, Louise Nevelson, Pol Bury, François Morellet, Véra Molnar, Bernar Venet, Jesús Rafael Soto, George Rickey and Eduardo Chillida, to cite just this group of Abstract artists for whom the undisputed master in this field, and model for all, was Alexander Calder. A fine heritage to which Luis Tomasello is making a brilliant contribution.

Serge Lemoine
Professor Emeritus, Sorbonne, Paris, December 2010