“Painting is animating a flat surface; animating a flat surface is giving rhythm to a space.”. Albert Gleizes, La peinture et ses lois, 1924.
Marc Cavell, whose real name was Michael Canter, was born in London in 1911. He studied painting at the School of Arts and Crafts and exhibited for the first time in 1936 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery before moving to Paris in the late 1930s to further his artistic education.
His early works displayed a figurative style influenced by Cézanne, and gradually evolved towards post-cubist forms as Cavell worked under the guidance of Albert Gleizes.
As a curious and eclectic artist, he became passionate about the endless possibilities of optical and kinetic art in the mid-1950s. He explored the concepts of movement and light as artistic materials. Between 1955 and 1966, he embarked on a true experiment focused on light and movement, which became the central elements of his work. Through light reflections on metallic surfaces (steel blades) or through translucent materials (plexiglass), he harnessed the changing effects of light to bring his works to life, offering infinite aesthetic and emotional possibilities
Experimenting with various formats, Cavell’s works, thanks to light, created a play of shadow and transparency, sometimes in color, which vibrated, intersected, and intermingled on the surface of the canvas. These “light sculptures” are open compositions that invite the viewer to contemplate, thus becoming an active participant in the artwork, capable of influencing their perception based on their position. None of Cavell’s works are static, and each viewer may see abstract motifs as waves, urban landscapes, or even architectural forms.
Marc Cavell passed away in 1989, and his works are now preserved in numerous institutions around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the French Ministry of Culture, the German Ministry of Culture in Stuttgart, and the University of Bremen.
