Luis Tomasello

Tomasello was born on 29 November 1915 in La Plata, in Argentina's Buenos Aires Province, to a family of Italian descent. He began evening drawing classes around 1929, then studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredon in Buenos Aires from 1932 to 1938, followed by further study at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Carcova, also in Buenos Aires, from 1940 to 1944.

In 1957 he settled permanently in Paris, joining the large community of expatriate Latin American kinetic artists working there. It was in this period that he developed the Atmospheres chromoplastiques, the series of relief works for which he became known internationally; the critic and poet Carlo Belloli is credited with naming the series in the catalogue for Tomasello's second solo exhibition at Galerie Denise Rene in 1965. He took part in the era's landmark kinetic and optical art exhibitions, including Bewogen Beweging at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1961, The Responsive Eye at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1965, and Lumiere et Mouvement at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1967. Museum retrospectives followed in Buenos Aires (1962), Pau (1972), Paris (1976), Madrid (1985), and La Plata (2004). He was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1976. Tomasello died in Paris on 17 January 2014, at the age of 98.

Tomasello's reputation rests on his consistent inclusion in the exhibitions that defined postwar kinetic and Op Art, from Bewogen Beweging and The Responsive Eye in the 1960s to a series of museum retrospectives that ran from Buenos Aires in 1962 through La Plata in 2004. Critic and poet Carlo Belloli, writing in the catalogue for Tomasello's 1965 exhibition at Galerie Denise Rene, is credited with coining the term Atmospheres mobiles chromoplastiques for the series, a label that stuck and became shorthand for his contribution to the movement: using shadow and reflected color, rather than painted surface alone, to animate a picture plane. Institutional recognition, including a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1976, reinforced his standing as a senior figure of the Paris-based Latin American kinetic circle, even as broader critical writing on him in major general-interest outlets remains comparatively sparse next to peers of the same movement.

Tomasello's secondary market is thin and unevenly documented compared with his museum standing. The most frequently cited high result is Atmosphere Chromoplastique No. 404, reported at USD 250,000 in 2017, but the auction house, exact sale date, and location are not confirmed in available records and this figure has not been independently corroborated across auction databases, so it should be treated as indicative rather than definitive. More recent European results for his reliefs and multiples have cleared well below that level, for example a Dorotheum sale at EUR 22,800 and a Lempertz sale at EUR 39,600, suggesting a market where individual results vary widely by work, size, and venue.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Tomasello, and public auction data is sparse enough that any single result, including the reported 2017 high, should be weighed carefully rather than treated as a stable benchmark. His estate and the galleries that have represented his work, including The Mayor Gallery in London and Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino in Houston, are the most reliable channels for provenance and authentication. His depth of museum representation, from the Centre Pompidou to Tate to the Reina Sofia, is the strongest indicator of his lasting art-historical standing, and it is a more durable signal than the current, still-thin secondary market.