Virtual museum, with more than 500 works

Julio Le Parc inaugurated his virtual museum, with more than 500 works available online
The website allows you to explore from anywhere on the planet for free, through your cell phone, computer, tablet or virtual reality headset, works made in different periods by the 96-year-old artist from Mendoza
“Free 24/7.” This is how Julio Le Parc announced from his Instagram account the opening of his virtual museum, a site that allows you to explore from anywhere on the planet through your cell phone, computer, tablet or virtual reality headset, more than five hundred works made in different periods and specially adapted for this digital platform by the 96-year-old artist from Mendoza.

The Julio Le Parc Virtual Labyrinthus Museum proposes “an immersive experience of contemporary art that goes a step further in the search to propose a dialogue between the work and the viewer,” anticipates the guided tour in three languages that greets the user on julioleparc.com. To the rhythm of Astor Piazzola's music, there you can access his paintings, mobiles, interactive games, sensory rooms, audiovisual material and an outdoor park with dynamic monumental sculptures.
“It works as a digital complement to the physical exhibitions, in order to generate an interactive experience,” adds the introductory video. You can also choose to explore various themes, from light boxes such as those that were part of the Le Parc Lumière exhibition at Malba in 2014, to the little-known torture room and the “virtual alchemies” exhibited in 2019 at the CCK, the mobiles that were exhibited that same year at the Teatro Colón or the recreation of the mapping of the Obelisk, which was also part of the celebration of his 90th birthday. As was the case that time, the technological development of the virtual museum was carried out by Another Polite Studio.

This guided tour also recalls that “since the 1960s, the concept of the labyrinth has been very present in Julio's work. The idea of being able to lose oneself in the labyrinth of perception to better find oneself after having gone through the stages of the initiatory journey. Room after room. When the viewer looks at one of these paintings on a wall, he has an uncontrollable desire to immerse himself in the canvas. To find himself inside, in weightlessness. To feel part of the work. To be a point of color in the middle of thousands of points of color. To lose physical, spatial and temporal references.”
The project had been announced in 2022, during the MAPA fair, in La Rural. “We racked our brains to fit 500 works into a little phone,” Juan Le Parc, who is promoting this initiative with his father, had joked then in conversation with LA NACION. And who has been working for more than fifteen years to develop this “technological achievement” to show how “contemporary art went from the static to the dynamic.” “Julio was one of the pioneers in interactivity and immersion. “He always sought the instability of the gaze,” he says now, once again in Buenos Aires, while the master of optical and kinetic art recovers from bronchitis in Paris.
“There is no such large museum dedicated to the work of a single artist,” adds Juan, who is already working on other projects such as a retrospective in virtual reality, films made with artificial intelligence based on sculptures he made in the 1970s and experiences with LED screens that add dynamism to paintings made decades ago. “The nicest thing is to use the virtual helmet,” he says, “because the works are seen in real size and it allows you, for example, to get inside their mobile phones. There is no guard telling you ‘don’t touch’. You connect to the site from the browser and enter their 3D universe.”
His brother Yamil is now in Madrid, supervising the installation of En Movimiento, the Le Parc exhibition that will open on March 6 at Albarrán Bourdais. There, Dark Blue Sphere (2013) will be exhibited, measuring 220 cm in diameter and made up of a hundred semi-transparent blue pieces, similar to the one he donated to the CCK (now the Palacio Libertad). In addition, at the ARCO fair, the gallery will hang another of his famous mobiles, similar to the one he installed last year at the Ezeiza International Airport.
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