Courtesy SalonVIP
The colorful floor at Venezuela’s main international airport has witnessed millions of arrivals, departures, and painful family separations. Now, just days after the government reopened the earthquake-damaged terminal, the family of artist Carlos Cruz-Diez says officials have taken the unmistakable design beyond the original artwork and turned it into airport branding without permission.
The family and estate of the late Venezuelan master have asked the state-run Instituto Aeropuerto Internacional de Maiquetía, known as IAIM, to stop reproducing and adapting elements from Cromointerferencia de color aditivo, the monumental installation Cruz-Diez created for the Simón Bolívar International Airport outside Caracas.
The dispute emerged as the government introduced temporary terminals and other structures following the June earthquakes that severely damaged the airport. Maiquetía resumed limited domestic and international operations on September 1, operating through four modular terminals while reconstruction of the original facilities continues.
In a statement released September 7, Cruz-Diez’s family said it had not authorized IAIM to reproduce, imitate or adapt the artwork’s chromatic pattern in those temporary areas or elsewhere.
According to the estate, elements recognizable from the airport floor have been extended to new structures, walls, employee uniforms, signs, official communications and government-operated digital platforms.
“This is not a simple aesthetic coincidence or a generic reference to the artistic language of Carlos Cruz-Diez,” the family said in a statement shared with this reporter. “Visual elements directly recognizable from a specific work are being used, reproduced and adapted to new formats and functions for which they were neither conceived nor authorized.”
IAIM is not a private airport operator. It was created by Venezuelan law as an autonomous state institution and remains responsible for the operation of the country’s principal international gateway. That makes the confrontation one between the heirs of one of Venezuela’s most celebrated artists and an institution controlled by the Venezuelan government.
The estate is not asking authorities to remove or conceal the original artwork. Instead, it wants the government to stop treating its distinctive lines and colors as a visual identity that can be reproduced wherever officials choose.
“The visual identity created by the master cannot be extracted from the work and transformed, without authorization, into decoration, uniforms or institutional identity,” the statement said. “Doing so does not pay tribute to it. It decontextualizes it.”
The floor is officially listed by the Carlos Cruz-Diez Foundation as Ambientación de Color Aditivo. It is also widely known as Cromointerferencia de color aditivo, the name used by the family in its statement.
Created between 1974 and 1978, the installation covers approximately 2,925 square meters, or more than 31,000 square feet of the international terminal’s corridors. It was not designed as a conventional mosaic or decorative floor.
Cruz-Diez planned the pattern in direct conversation with the terminal’s architecture, lighting and scale. As passengers walk across it, their movement and changing point of view produce different visual combinations. The viewer does not simply observe the artwork. The viewer activates it.
That concept was central to Cruz-Diez’s career.
Born in Caracas in 1923, Cruz-Diez moved to Paris in 1960 and became one of the defining figures of kinetic and optical art. Instead of using color merely to fill a shape or represent an object, he treated it as an independent phenomenon capable of changing with light, space and human movement.
His work “aimed at liberating color from its material support” and turning it into a participatory experience, according to the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which has presented his immersive Chromosaturation installation. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has similarly described his life’s work as an effort to demonstrate how color could become “an autonomous event” that invades space.
Cruz-Diez died in Paris in 2019 at age 95, leaving behind public installations and works held or exhibited by major institutions around the world. In Venezuela, however, no creation carries the emotional weight of the Maiquetía floor.
Over the past two decades, it has acquired a meaning the artist could not have anticipated when it was installed. As millions of Venezuelans left the country amid political repression and economic collapse, photographs taken on the Cruz-Diez floor became a ritual of departure. Shoes, passports and suitcases framed against its bright lines came to represent uncertainty, exile and the possibility that a goodbye might last for years.
The artwork that once embodied the modern, prosperous Venezuela of the 1970s became a silent witness to the country’s historic migration crisis.
Its symbolic importance also complicates the government’s use of the pattern. Although the work is part of Venezuela’s cultural heritage and is physically incorporated into a state-owned airport, the family argues that its public location does not transform its recognizable elements into government-owned graphics.
The estate said extracting the pattern and transferring it to unrelated surfaces could affect copyright protections as well as the moral right to preserve the integrity of the work. Venezuela’s Law on Copyright recognizes protections related to authorship, reproduction and modifications of artistic creations.
The family has asked IAIM to suspend the design’s use on temporary floors, walls, new structures, uniforms, signage, publications and official online platforms. It also offered to advise airport authorities on conservation and future projects involving the original work.
The request, the estate stressed, is not intended to prevent the restoration, documentation or cultural promotion of the installation. The goal is to ensure that those efforts preserve the context and intention behind Cruz-Diez’s creation.
Concerns about the floor’s preservation predate the current dispute. In 2018, the heritage organization IAM Venezuela documented deterioration and delays in its restoration, describing the installation as an inseparable part of the airport’s architecture.
As of publication, IAIM had not issued a publicly available response to the family’s allegations or said whether it would remove the disputed designs.
“Protecting an artwork does not mean only preserving it physically,” the family said. “It also means preserving its integrity, its context and its identity against unauthorized uses or transformations.”
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