While the surrounding world can seem more vivid when reduced to black or white, Sofia Nercasseau advocates the power of the full spectrum. “color lab(Colour Lab), the artist’s first major institutional exhibition, moves from an educational demonstration of scientific knowledge to a dramatic and poetic exposition of how we perceive light. Along the way, various elements of this total installation recall those of the painters Tarsila do Amaral or Xul Solar, as well as the little-known works of Hilma af Klint and her coterie or even the experimental cinema of Agnès Varda.
The exhibition explores the relationship of color to the written word, science and the natural world. In a first part, Nercasseau offers a series of ceramics, the artist’s book blue folder2018, and Color in black and white2023, nineteen photograms that take a conceptual approach to defining color. Glass stairs, 2023, revisits Goethe’s triangle, the poet’s experimental theory of the light spectrum’s connection to human emotion. The project sets up two glass staircases each containing water, tinted in yellow and blue. The concentration of hue changes with the surface, echoing Goethe’s discoveries. Installation Black Sun2023, nods to the origins of color with a rotating bulb that projects text describing the travel time of a ray of light to Earth from the sun: eight minutes and twenty seconds.
The exhibition ends with Excerpts from the Colors Laboratory, 2023, a projection that lists the artist’s attempts to locate chromatic patterns in his daily environment. His research oscillates between generic definition and specific manifestation, between macro and micro, and between perception and action.
