Patricia Low Contemporary is excited to present Lumination, an exhibition that explores how artists from the 1960s to the present have used and referred to various technological forms of light, spanning commercial light fixtures to paint-on-canvas to photographic means, to manifest the intense ambiguities and ambivalences of light as a simultaneously physical and ephemeral entity.
The term ‘lumination’ underscores the concerns of the artists in this exhibition with the complex and hard-to-pin-down nature of light as, in certain cases, a kind of quantifiable material; and, in others, an illusory effect. In a recent essay art historian Richard Shiff discusses this in relation to the work of one of the exhibition’s key artists, Dan Flavin:
‘Without the customary directional indicator (il-) the various applications of the concept of lumination weaken the distinction between subject and object, active cause (to luminate) and passive effect (also to luminate, tantamount to being luminated). Flavin’s light has neither object nor objective. It merely lights, like an eye that sees without insisting on a point of view or establishing an organizing perspective. Flavin’s light happens.’
Far from an exhaustive survey, key historical works by Dan Flavin, Jules Olitski, Sally Hazelet Drummond, and Louis Cane anchor the exhibition in several selective, yet seminal legacies extending from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
By examining industrially produced light, Flavin’s work suggests a materialist perspective. While Jules Olitski’s approach, using the more traditional vehicle of paint-on-canvas, can be seen as advancing a painterly color field approach to generating an immersive plane of light. Yet their strategies have certain parallels, if not at the level of materials and presentation, for both artists sought to evoke the sensation of color suspended in the atmosphere. For Olitski this was achieved via his signature use of the spray gun to lay down luminous layers of acrylic. While for Flavin this is the very condition of the chemical reaction by which his fluorescent tubes generate light.
Lumination is framed by these two philosophical and formal poles: between the evocation of light ‘directly’ via light-generating technologies, such as Flavin’s fluorescent tubes; and its suggestion by other means, most expressly through paint. Technological developments in lighting are both inspired by supposedly ‘natural’ experiences of light, and in turn intervene in, and in doing so change, our notions of what ‘natural light’ is. Technology informs life, and vice versa, while art takes note. This has been true at least since Impressionism, when the rapid development of electric light radically changed both the presentation and perception of that favorite Impressionist subject—modern urban life.
It is not surprising, then, that certain artists have periodically returned to the formal, painterly innovations of the Impressionists and their even more scientifically-oriented successors, the Post-Impressionists. The legacy of Seurat’s regular, atomized brushstroke resounds in the work of Sally Hazelet Drummond, a peer of Flavin’s, along whose side she was championed, early in her career, by key Minimalist Donald Judd. Her paintings show the potential for oil on canvas to evoke luminous associations not necessarily found in nature, but which nonetheless don’t feel opposed to the natural.
