Cerith Wyn Evans. Borrowed light through Metz
Curator : Zoe Stillpass
In Gallery 3 and the Forum at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Cerith Wyn Evans (born in Wales in 1958, lives and works in London) will create a poetic sensorial garden. This solo exhibition, his first in France of this scale since his show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (ARC) in 2006, will bring together several series of luminous sculptures which have become emblematic of his practice in recent years.
For Borrowed Light Through Metz, Cerith Wyn Evans presents his first solo exhibition in a French institution since his 2006 show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (ARC). Transforming the Forum and Gallery 3, he brings together light and sound works to occasion mises-en-scene of radiant visual and aural effects. Like characters in a repertory theater, older works return and interact with recent works to generate new scenarios. Each work remains singular yet the artist places them in concert in such a way that the exhibition constantly mutates as if animated by an inner life.
Cerith Wyn Evans began his career as an experimental filmmaker and has maintained his correspondence with conceptual art since the 1970s, focusing on sculpture and installation. His works retain the cinematic qualities of his earlier career, however the viewers are no longer merely passive observers; their bodily presence and changing perspectives play a central role. For nearly forty years, the artist has developed a unique practice through which he explores the limits of perception, and, in the process, calls into question the conventions of exhibition-making.
In the Forum of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a “winter garden” presents works that, among other themes, blurs the boundaries between nature and culture. At the same time, the garden plays off Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines’s architecture that folds the outside inside and the inside out. For this installation, the artist fills the ground level space with plants that bathe in natural sunlight coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Amidst the plants, two columns made from tubes of filament light bulbs, recall the paper tubes for which Shigeru Ban, has become famous. Like enormously tall glass trees, they stretch up to the 35-meter-high ceiling. The columns on this occasion will not consciously transmit light. They are a silent sign, evoking the inevitable progress of technology. Also in the Forum, large amethyst geodes set in glass crates act as guides to the dialogue between the natural and the social.
In an atmosphere significantly different from that of the winter garden, Cerith Wyn Evans turns the third-floor gallery into what he calls a “stroll garden”. Here, the artist covers the 80-meter-long walls with mirrors and uncovers the large windows at either end of the gallery so that the outside light and views borrowed from Metz become active elements in the exhibit. The unfocused light emanating from the sculptures create electrifying effects as they bounce off the mirrors. The luminous and sonorous works appear to express an interior vital force. For example, five columns made of LED bulbs slowly light up to a blinding full intensity and fade off to total transparency at a pace that gives the impression they are calmly breathing. This work echoes the nearby transparent glass sculpture with crystal flutes that inhale and exhale the surrounding air according to a programmed algorithmic design. The flutes perform on their own, emitting eerie drone-like sounds. While playing the flute or making hand-blown glass usually requires human breath, here the human body has disappeared, and the artwork has found its own voice. Suspended abstract neon drawings in light based on traditional Japanese Noh theater seem to perform a frenetic dance.
The exhibit as a whole reverberates in reflections, and flickering lights that bleed into each other. Thereupon, the visitors become actors in a choreography of natural and artificial light, shadows, sound, and silence. With the diffusion of the light and sonic waves along with the ever-changing positions of the spectators, each moment of viewing becomes a new event.
Location: Centre Pompidou-Metz
Discover the culturel agenda of Centre Pompidou-Metz during Luxembourg Art Week
