"LIGHT MATTERS" BY EMMA GRADIN
“...[T]he success obtained by the work of art ... [is] to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible.”Jean-François Lyotard
At first sight, Daniel Lergon’s retroreflective paintings seem, more than anything else, to emphasise what we cannot see. According to a traditional definition, painting is the application of pigment to a two-dimensional surface whose only purpose is to act as a carrier. Lergon chooses instead to use a transparent lacquer on an engineered fabric designed to throw light back in the direction from which it came. The surface itself produces the colour, modulated by a transparent medium that forms a barrier to light-reflection.
Upon entering the Whiteout exhibition, which featured 16 of Lergon’s white paintings in a hyperbolic white cube setting, the visitor is immersed in a dizzyingly strong light. The space is lit by a continuous stretch of fluorescent tubes along the walls2. The retroreflective white material that Lergon uses for his canvases is of the kind that, in its more common grey form, is used for utility wear or cycle gear in order to make the wearer more visible in the dark. The material reflects rays of light right back to the source from which it came. It consists of a layer of background colour, in this case white, and another layer of very small plastic beads that disperse and angle the light in a very different way than if the surface were flat. The varnish that Lergon applies, to drive over the surface and leave marks, works as a barrier to stop this reflection. It flattens the surface and blocks some of the light. There is an incredible range of shades of white in the exhibition; there are blueish whites, greyish, yellowish and metallic whites – the varnish appears to take on these colours as light is trapped beneath it.
Although we appreciate that white light is the sum of all colours on the spectrum, white is thought of as a non-colour and a white plain or surface is considered neutral and deemed unfinished or naked. Still, whiteness factors crucially in our existence: in the strong rays of daylight, in the essential first nourishing drops of milk, in the white flag offering peace, in socially constructed racial identities, in a sheet of white paper that carries an artist’s deliberations, in the sterile environments of a hospital or laboratory, but also in materials valued for their aesthetic assets such as pearl or marble as well as in the ‘purity’ and concomitant high status of the white gallery space, the white cube.
The Whiteout paintings create a scattering of light in all directions, a thickness in the atmosphere of the immediate surroundings of the painting. The whiteness is dense and pillowy, flattening and bulging, appearing and disappearing with the movement of the beholder. What are otherwise subtle, elusive figures are brought into focus by the near vacuous surfaces that surround them. As the light simultaneously facilitates and impedes vision, the experience becomes an awareness of perception itself.
This interest in using light, not coloured pigment, for generating images we have seen in works by artists of the Light & Space movement in Southern California since the 1960s. Paintings by Mary Corse, too, use retroreflective material and raise similar issues concerning the limits of perception and metaphysical aspects of the medium of painting. In a review of an exhibition of Mary Corse’s work, the LA Times art critic Sharon Mizota describes how “[a]s in all good Light and Space art, we experience ourselves seeing.”3
It is a transformative, transcendental viewing experience: As our eyes get adjusted to the light phenomenon, our experience of the works changes radically and the figures on the canvas come into focus. Along with our becoming aware of looking at art works we go through several stages of perception. A force field of light is pressed upon us, the light affecting us before we have taken in the images. Blots and particles appear directly on the retina in an entoptic visual experience – a perception generated physically in the eye rather than as an interpretation in our brains of something we encounter. In a way, the glare of light hits us before perception. Lergon’s signs and marks in varnish begin to show. It takes a while before we can make out the motifs on each painting, and we have to continuously re-model them as our eyes move around the surface of the canvas. It is as if we, the viewers, must create the paintings again.
This agitational viewing experience, along with the vastness of some of Lergon’s largest paintings (the States of Matter-series for example, exhibited at Andersen’s Contemporary in Berlin in 2008), intimates the sublime. Measuring 400 x 720 cm they are difficult to take in due to both their sheer size and the light effects brought on by the distinctive base material. When we stand up close, in front of them, the paintings continue beyond the pale of vision. The title of each of the four paintings belonging to the States of Matter-series refers to different physical conditions of material substance: solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasmatic.4
The quote at the beginning of this text comes from Jean-François Lyotard’s essay The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, first published in Artforum in 1984, and more recently in an anthology on the sublime edited by the British artist and art historian Simon Morley. In the introductory chapter, Morley traces back the origin of that notion by describing the etymology of the term: “sublimare (to elevate) commonly used [in the Middle Ages] by alchemists to describe the purifying process by which substances turn into a gas on being subjected to heat, then cool and become a newly transformed solid.”5 This is still the term used in contemporary physics for a transformation from solid state to vapour and back again into solid matter.6
The idea of solid matter and a palpable substance evaporating into or being formed from a vaporous or ephemeral substance strikes me as analogous to some aspects of Lergon’s work. In the exhibitions Iapetus7 and dualis8 he is contrasting and simultaneously working on retroreflective paintings and metal drawings performed directly on the gallery wall. The metal drawings foreground the materiality of the space they form part of, and of materiality itself as a concept. The emphasis in these three exhibitions is the phenomenal dichotomy of light and matter – and the wave and particle character they both appear to have. Daniel Lergon has expressed an interest in these similarities of the way that light and matter behave during a studio visit where he explained how “[o]n a subatomical level light and matter actually have similar qualities – they are both energy packets.”
These physical aspects of Lergon’s works are reflected in his work method, whereby he sets up the conditions for the motifs to appear by applying loads of lacquer in pools or by driving it over the surface of the canvas, letting figures form from a set of circumstances. In the early 19th Century, the landscape painter John Constable said in a lecture at a turning point in his career and in thinking about artistic work: “Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?”9
The physical and sublime qualities of Lergon’s works evoke thoughts of other tremendous and formidable subjects, such as the extent of the universe or the beginning of life itself.
A triptych of paintings at the entrance of the Whiteout exhibition describes a kind of narrative, an event unfolding: First hangs a mountain peak with fluid lines running downwards. In the painting next to it a lozenge-shaped body is in a falling motion from the upper right to the lower left of the picture plane, a formerly spherical celestial body burning into an oval with the friction of atmosphere and matter. The third piece is a block with a melting ‘tail’.10 Further inside the exhibition there are triangular shapes like fins of an early fish or whale-like animal and the strong light at first gives one painting the appearance of an x-ray of a spine or a spine fossil. This changes, with the shading of the light as one moves closer, into a fistful of clay with finger-imprints instead, something more or less purposefully made and put into shape.
Thoughts on the beginning of life lend the paintings aspects of creatures rising from wetness and of bubbly shapes of melting ice or icebergs. In one of the paintings (untitled), a nameless entity rises from a swamp or perhaps the sea, the light reflections creating its animation as we move before it. The paintings emit volumes of light that we have to physically move in from side to side in order to perceive the motifs, closer to and further from the canvas, in rhythmic accordance with our visual experience and the pace of our eyes moving over their surface.
It is often suggested that life originated in the sea where volcanoes on the sea floor released organic matter into the water 3.5 billion years ago, before the ice-ages and the Snowball Earth-periods when the entire planet was covered in ice11. Cyanobacteria, and single cells and particles of protein floating in the sea froze and resided in the ice until more favourable conditions came along. With the melting of the ice they reached the sunlight and started to produce oxygen which in turn made it possible for plants to develop, and eventually the first animals around 550 million years ago.12 In the lacquer of the white paintings dust particles have become encased and enveloped – frozen in time and captured like fossils or those first cells in glacial ice.
In the 3000K-exhibition13 that followed on Whiteout, the white paintings have radiated out from the centre of the gallery where metal wall drawings are found directly applied to the surfaces of the white gallery walls. Here and in the title are references to the moment seconds after the Big Bang, when light and matter are thought to have separated. The motifs too are radiating and spreading – swathes of transparent lacquer are driven across the surface in an outward-striving motion, leaving only a thin film behind. The reflective abilities of the canvas are reduced and the immediately surrounding environment stabilised. The rusty metal dust drawings in direct connection with the white walls of the building are the material counterbalance to ephemeral reflections of light, and yet they are the solid version of the same matter. Photosynthesised organisms appear as dark granules on ice-white glaciers. Having been preserved and frozen inside for a very long time, they are now exposed to solar power and start to change. We can still see what might appear as dirt on the surface of modern glaciers as they melt in the sun and bear the beginnings of new life.
Lergon’s work not only makes seen what makes one see but also how something comes into being – from solid into a vaporous state, and back again. This is taking place right before us, whether we can see it or not.
December 2012
1 The Whiteout exhibition took place in the Almine Rech gallery on rue Saintogne in Le Marais, Paris, 21st January – 19th February 2011.
2 The Almine Rech gallery has three interlinked rooms on the ground floor, a small space under the stairs leading up to a large top floor with two rooms, with works by another artist in one of them. The windows are covered to block out any natural light.
3 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/19/entertainment/la-et-cm-art-review-mary-corse-20120416
4 States of Matter, 1 November 2007 – 14 November 2008, Andersen’s Contemporary, Berlin.
5 Simon Morley: The Sublime, London and Cambridge MA, 2010, p. 14
6 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sublime
7 Iapetus, 27 March – 25 April 2010, Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, Germany.
8 dualis, 12 May – 19 June 2011, Christian Larsen gallery, Stockholm.
9 E. H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion, Oxford, 1990 (first published 1960), p. 29
10 Daniel Lergon has in previous work and exhibition-titles expressed an interest in the beginning of Earth and the birth of light itself in the seconds following the Big Bang: dualis (2011, Christian Larsen gallery, Stockholm), 3000K (2011, Andreas Huber gallery, Vienna), Elements (2010, Almine Rech gallery, Brussels) and Untitled (5 White Paintings) (2010) a series of paintings that form a narrative which Daniel during a studio visit describes as “the division of cells from a whole”.
11 This according to theories that are highly debated but increasingly treated as likely.
12 Michael J. Russell & Allan J. Hall: The Origin of Life research project, University of Glasgow, January 2000 (layman’s abstract) http://www.gla.ac.uk/projects/originoflife/html/2001/laymans_abstract.htm, Science-Daily on Snowball Earth theory and early animal evolution http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101027133146.htm
13 3000K, 16 March – 7 May 2011, Andreas Huber gallery, Vienna.