The Motion Is Haphazard, The Situation Unpredictable

He does use paint. Any other resemblance in the recent works of Enrique Castro-Cid to traditional artmaking is a backward stretch of the imagination. His palette also includes electromagnets, electric eyes, air compressors, motion-picture projectors; his gift is in knowing how to combine them deftly into an esthetic commentary (see opposite page). Says he: "I put all the components together to make a situation that is not predictable."

Bouncing Balls. Since his student days in his native Chile, Castro-Cid's art has thrived on unpredictable influences. While he lived in tropical Central America he painted in hot Fauve colors: "Nature made me get out of myself," he says, "it opened my pores." In Mexico City, he wandered into the anthropological museum. "Suddenly I had pre-Columbian memories that, of course, were impossible for me to have." A series of Fauve paintings of Quetzalcoatl, the brightly plumed serpent god, was the result.

From anthropology, Castro-Cid moved on to anatomy. Arriving in Manhattan with his wife, Harper's Bazaar Cover Model Sylvia, he spent hours peering into musty display cases in Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. Says he: "My paintings grew to be surrealist abstractions with the hint of skeletal joints expressing patterns of growth." To add motion to them, he made toylike, motor-driven robots. They jousted like a 21st century Punch and Judy show, chased tiny balls with spinning hoops in an electronic version of Alexander Calder's 1926 "Circus."

His latest works, currently at Manhattan's Richard Feigen Gallery, avoid the clanking humdrum of much kinetic art. Magically, when someone approaches his Sensitive Sphere, a particolored ball bounces into the air. In a variation, an 8-mm. film is projected into an airborne ball, playfully contorting and distorting the tiny images of human figures. Another work presents the appearance of a bouncing ball inside a shaped screen by means of rear projection.

Role of Chance. His robots have turned into cybernetic escapades. Behind their Plexiglas facades, these new sculptures are as immediate and erratic as a jukebox full of Beatles. His sculptures are "superfluous, relating to no specific function. They are instruments for me to express something." What? The answer seems to be the way that the world appears to be controlled by chance. Says he: "I assume that our society has sensed this unpredictability. Look at the number of insurance com panies." In the future, he hopes to get his messages across more directly by making his audience an active part of his art. He plans to use more under-glass movies, to script mechanical happenings. "The idea is not to make man into a robot," he says, "but to make him feel free in a world of machines."

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