More about light
Yesterday I was talking about consciousness raising by torchlight. Today it’s light from a different point of view. It is difficult to convey the importance of light to an image. I don’t mean lighting, which is a wholly different matter, external to the thing itself. I mean the effect of apparent light from within — an impression produced by colour and tone.
I recently talked about light to a group of students. One young man, articulate and interested, made it perfectly clear he didn’t have a clue what I was on about. ‘Everything is visible due to the effects of light — you can’t see anything if it isn’t’ he objected. While this may be true, it does slightly miss the point. It’s a bit like noticing that all foods have a flavour, or that all sounds can be musical — an observation you need to harness to go anywhere with it.
The art historian Paul Hills has given scholarly thought to how light works. In the introduction to his masterly book The Light of Early Italian Painting he suggests that an interest in depicted light is a historical anomaly, even if it is one that lasts for a number of centuries. His implication is that before the Renaissance we were not concerned with representing light, and after the Impressionists we lose our interest in it. Paul Hills is uniquely insightful, but on this point I disagree. Surely the fuzzy haloed forms around a typical Rothko ‘portal’ are analogies for represented light, and a great deal of abstraction is concerned precisely with these issues.
Contemporary art is perennially conducting literal re-stagings, in the form of installations, into some of the aesthetic enquiries of modernism. So when a couple of weeks ago I went to a show at the V22 gallery in Dalston, to see a show of work by Fergal Stapleton. I wasn’t surprised to see the gallery itself transformed into a canvas, on which LEDs, an oil slide illuminated by projector, a bare light bulb and shadow casting screens had been mounted. These are today’s three dimensional non-metaphorical analogies for the metaphors for light we see in twentieth century painting.
Image from V22 of work by Fergal Stapleton
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