“Color is the most relative medium in art”, according to Josef Albers. Its relativity, along with the subjective nature of visual perception, forms the basis of the immersive light installations that make up “Exact Dutch Yellow”, the most recent exhibition from the Chicago-based Luftwerk collaboration (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero), which has transformed the fourth-floor galleries of this cultural institution in an oasis of complex optical phenomena.
Luftwerk’s multimedia practice encompasses light-based public projects and large-scale architectural interventions, often in iconic modernist buildings. Here, viewers were drawn into dark galleries by the radiant glow of eight mostly wall-mounted objects, including two neon word sculptures, a mural, and various concave and flat panel-like works airbrushed with dyes botanicals and “activated” by programmed sequences of LEDs. Spaciously installed to offer a series of intimate one-on-one encounters, these works revealed how light alters our perception of color, as illustrated in Interaction of light, 2020, a set of prints combining two color wheels that show how the same color spectrum appears differently on inverted patterns. The title of the work revolves around Albers’ influential book The interaction of color (1963).
The associated three-dimensional Portrait n° 1 yellow to blue2020, and Portrait n°2 Mauve in Gamboge, 2021, set Albers’ theories in motion to examine how color affects the body and the senses. Installed on opposite sides of an interior wall, these conical shapes (constructed of painted fiberglass and aluminum and lined with LEDs) appeared, when viewed from the front, as floating orbs of pulsating chroma whose concentric rings flow seamlessly from fiery oranges and saffron yellows to warm mauves and deep blues, all to mesmerizing effect.
While Luftwerk never denies the metaphysical and sometimes spiritual properties of their chosen medium, the duo use light to demonstrate how color defines the physical world and our understanding of it. For this, the exhibition was inspired by Werner’s color schedule (1814), a taxonomic guide by geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner who established fifty-four colors found in nature, including a reddish flax which he identified as Dutch orange, the hue of common marigold. Before Pantone, Werner’s book set the standard for the study of color in the arts and natural sciences. The manual was also used by Charles Darwin on his infamous voyage to the HMS Beagle. Writing in the pages of Werner’s text, Darwin noted his sighting of a striated caracara (a Mexican eagle), whose legs he described as “an exact Dutch yellow”.
Such a story, provided in the didactics of the works, was useful in understanding the provenance of the title of the exhibition – scripted in an orange and yellow neon sculpture at the entrance to the exhibition – but not essential to the experience of the art itself or its atmospheric pieces. on the interior architecture of the gallery. On the ground Perceptual landscape, 2022, a horizontal field covered in raw powdered pigments of ultramarine, ocher and green is transfigured into a kind of otherworldly lunar terrain through a soft wave of projected light that undergoes subtle changes of intensity, so that each color seems to flow seamlessly into the next. An accompanying score of synthesized minimalist tones enhances the spatial and affective dimensions of the installation.
Luftwerk’s diverse, colorful landscapes owe as much to legacies of abstract painting as to histories of natural science, as the triptych suggests. Meadow, 2022: three airbrushed canvases in earth tones of yellow and green that, when illuminated, suggest the passage from dawn to dusk; the piece evoked the work of Mark Rothko and the Color Field School. The most static The sky back then was Berlin blue, 2022, enveloped the viewer in a numinous expanse of the titular hue while occupying an entire gallery wall. Descending from ultramarine blue-black to almost white, this meditative monochrome painting – composed of fifty-two horizontal bands rendered in various shades of cerulean – was created using a cyanometer, a tool invented in 1789 to measure blue from the sky. Both contemplative and alluring, these works give shape to the intangible while reconfiguring the natural world as experiential environments of pure color and light. Seen against the backdrop of today’s climate crisis, which has severely altered Earth’s ecology, “Exact Dutch Yellow” presented an accurate view of nature, asking us to really see.
