Federico Díaz’s creativity knows no bounds. Although his beginnings were as a painter and sculptor, today he makes works involving multimedia art, interactive installations and projections, light and kinetic art, sound compositions and architecture. Among the more remarkable aspects of his creative production are architectural designs. He has already accomplished three architectural projects in Prague. At the moment, his plan for a 30‐storey building called Cobra is under consideration for two potential sites in Asia.
Díaz considers architecture a complex discipline that nonetheless emanates from sculpture, adding that “architecture is basically sculpture with more active sociology.” Like many artists exploring new dimensions before him in the Renaissance during the 14th and 15th centuries, his work often blurs the differences between art and science. In a further link with the Renaissance, his work often references the natural world, inspired by the structures of such living creatures as the nautilus and sea urchins. He created his first important work called Nostalgia, drawn from the composition of a seashell, when he was only twenty years old. The sculpture was purchased by The National Gallery in Prague.
Díaz is not copying anything but instead, in numerous ways and with numerous means, he is continuously inventing and reinventing through his prodigious imagination and voracious energy. Fully fluent with computer science, he works with the E AREA Team that he founded in 1994 “to prepare visual and architectural strategies for the next millennium”. The team, consisting of ten people, primarily architects and media programmers, collaborate with him on a continuing basis. Díaz observes that “his art is created without contact with the human hand.” His creative energy enables him to inform and direct those involved. In this manner, his creative acts may also be considered a kind of extension of the Renaissance workshop. He has sometimes documented the creative process in a kind of visual theater or happening as part of his work.
The thinking and philosophy of the distinguished artist and professor, Karel Malich, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, marked a turning point in Díaz’s life vis‐a vis his perceptions of art and the development of his creative energies. Says Díaz, “Malich has had a significant influence on me regarding the pursuit of invisible energy in the visible and the inaudible in the audible.
Robert T. Buck
Director, The Brooklyn Museum, 1983–1996
Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, 1973–1982 New York