Anthony McCall’s. Solid Light Works
At the LAC in Lugano.
Walk in the Light!
Walk in the Light!
Your
first impression is dizzying. In the dark that envelops everything,
you are afraid you might stumble over something that isn’t there.
Anthony McCall’s “Solid Light Works” solo exhibition, curated
by Bettina Della Casa, is made up of just that, works of solid light
in the vast underground environment of the LAC in Lugano (until 31
January). The British artist, New Yorker by adoption, who has studied
light, spaces and volumes as the basic elements of art since the
1970’s, invites you to experience the exhibition as a physical
experience. As your pupils dilate in the darkness, five projectors
trace luminous beams in the air that coil very slowly together to
create profiles of inexistent sculptures and suspended ectoplasms.
Entering into the fluorescent cones, instinct tells you to reach out
your hand to grab the void, made dense by a vaporous haze created by
old fog machines and smoke machines used in theaters and cinemas for
black and white films.
The
play of shadow and fog create (non-)bodily sensations and McCall has
obtained his goal: put the viewer in the centre of the “frame”,
stimulate his perceptions, conceptualize on the eternal themes of
passing time and movement that changes things. In the span of an
hour, a point of light expands to become a circle; this is the first
historic work entitled Line Describing a
Cone from 1973. This concept does not
change in more recent works: ellipses, spirals, lemniscates (once he
drew them on film, now he entrusts them to sophisticated digital
animation) generate hypnotic images in space and in the mind of those
who cross through the silence. The immersion into Meeting
You Halfway and Face
to Face leads the viewer to a subtle
reflection on communication, on the possible dialogue between those
you might meet in the light.
(from La Repubblica, ottobre 2015)