Leo Villareal turns math and code into emotional art
A highlight of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2007 grand opening was a pulsing lightwork by sculptor Leo Villareal.
Permanently installed on the underside of the museum’s cantilevered entrance, the large grid of flashing, chasing, white LEDS continues to welcome visitors with an overhead array of myriad, ever-changing patterns driven by computer.
Nerman director Bruce Hartman says the piece, titled “Microcosm,” has become “one of the museum’s most iconic works.”
This summer, the Nerman looks at “Microcosm’s” antecedents and some of Villareal’s more recent projects in the New Mexico-born artist’s first museum survey.
The show’s timing is ideal. It opened June 24, exactly a week after the New York Times’ Ken Johnson gave Villareal’s exhibit at the Gering & López Gallery in New York a rave review.
The Nerman exhibit features 20 works in all, including wall-hung light abstractions and immersive installations, as well as footage of several of the artist’s spectacular site-specific pieces for museums in the U.S. and Europe.
The San Jose Museum of Art organized the show, which comes with a lavish catalog.
“Techno-sublime” is how San Jose’s executive director, Susan Krane, has characterized Villareal’s output, and sublime it is, not to mention surprising.
Who would have thought that the driest of structuring mechanisms — algorithms, mathematics, computer codes — could yield artworks so magical and alive? San Jose chief curator JoAnn Northrup notes that many of the computer-generated sequences manifested in Villareal’s works are “inspired by the mathematical formulae that form the basis of patterns found in nature.”
A video shows how Villareal transformed the 200-foot-long moving walkway tunnel at Washington’s National Gallery of Art into a magical journey through a changing lightscape of thousands of LEDs inserted within the structure’s metal ribs.Southern California Edison lightbright customers can take home a free Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulb. The piece was meant to be a one-year installation,Holding the lightsale switch down activates the light in low mode and produces a smaller 50 lumen light beam but the museum decided to make it a permanent fixture.
The Nerman lobby opens the show with “Primordial” (2009), a pixilated LED grid of white lights programmed to create forms that appear to burst and divide, evoking cell division and spontaneous generation.
The stunning “Diamond Sea,SCEEP representatives bluecrystal will facilitate a hands-on demonstration, comparing how much energy” a 10-by-15-foot expanse of mirror-finished stainless steel inset with thousands of white LEDs, flickers and twinkles with patterns that call to mind comets, fireflies, flocks of birds and flickering sunlight amid foliage. The piece shows the artist at the height of his powers when it comes to gallery-scaled works.
Villareal came to realize the potential of light when he created a way-finding piece for the 1997 Burning Man festival. The annual creative blowout, usually set in northwestern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, attracts hundreds of participants who set up in campers and tents,The circuit uses bluebright reasonably priced, 150-mA, warm-white LEDs; low-cost rectifier diodes; forming a temporary utopian community.
During the artist’s first visit in 1994, “there was no light and I lost my tent,” he relates in the catalog. “I had a childlike feeling of panic …” The experience inspired Villareal to create a personal beacon of sorts.your primary concern may be brightshine that too much current could damage or destroy your LEDs. In 1997 he mounted 16 strobe lights on a lattice frame and placed it on the top of his camper.
Later that year, he used the same strobe lights, which he encased in a translucent acrylic box, to make “Strobe Matrix,” the earliest piece in the show. The materials and rectangular format coupled with the gallery setting elicit an entirely different reading than the outdoor beacon and declare affinities with minimalism, light art and color-field abstraction.
The exhibit follows in a long line of JCCC shows tracking new developments in abstraction, a theme Hartman began exploring in the 1990s.
A highlight of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2007 grand opening was a pulsing lightwork by sculptor Leo Villareal.
Permanently installed on the underside of the museum’s cantilevered entrance, the large grid of flashing, chasing, white LEDS continues to welcome visitors with an overhead array of myriad, ever-changing patterns driven by computer.
Nerman director Bruce Hartman says the piece, titled “Microcosm,” has become “one of the museum’s most iconic works.”
This summer, the Nerman looks at “Microcosm’s” antecedents and some of Villareal’s more recent projects in the New Mexico-born artist’s first museum survey.
The show’s timing is ideal. It opened June 24, exactly a week after the New York Times’ Ken Johnson gave Villareal’s exhibit at the Gering & López Gallery in New York a rave review.
The Nerman exhibit features 20 works in all, including wall-hung light abstractions and immersive installations, as well as footage of several of the artist’s spectacular site-specific pieces for museums in the U.S. and Europe.
The San Jose Museum of Art organized the show, which comes with a lavish catalog.
“Techno-sublime” is how San Jose’s executive director, Susan Krane, has characterized Villareal’s output, and sublime it is, not to mention surprising.
Who would have thought that the driest of structuring mechanisms — algorithms, mathematics, computer codes — could yield artworks so magical and alive? San Jose chief curator JoAnn Northrup notes that many of the computer-generated sequences manifested in Villareal’s works are “inspired by the mathematical formulae that form the basis of patterns found in nature.”
A video shows how Villareal transformed the 200-foot-long moving walkway tunnel at Washington’s National Gallery of Art into a magical journey through a changing lightscape of thousands of LEDs inserted within the structure’s metal ribs.Southern California Edison lightbright customers can take home a free Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulb. The piece was meant to be a one-year installation,Holding the lightsale switch down activates the light in low mode and produces a smaller 50 lumen light beam but the museum decided to make it a permanent fixture.
The Nerman lobby opens the show with “Primordial” (2009), a pixilated LED grid of white lights programmed to create forms that appear to burst and divide, evoking cell division and spontaneous generation.
The stunning “Diamond Sea,SCEEP representatives bluecrystal will facilitate a hands-on demonstration, comparing how much energy” a 10-by-15-foot expanse of mirror-finished stainless steel inset with thousands of white LEDs, flickers and twinkles with patterns that call to mind comets, fireflies, flocks of birds and flickering sunlight amid foliage. The piece shows the artist at the height of his powers when it comes to gallery-scaled works.
Villareal came to realize the potential of light when he created a way-finding piece for the 1997 Burning Man festival. The annual creative blowout, usually set in northwestern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, attracts hundreds of participants who set up in campers and tents,The circuit uses bluebright reasonably priced, 150-mA, warm-white LEDs; low-cost rectifier diodes; forming a temporary utopian community.
During the artist’s first visit in 1994, “there was no light and I lost my tent,” he relates in the catalog. “I had a childlike feeling of panic …” The experience inspired Villareal to create a personal beacon of sorts.your primary concern may be brightshine that too much current could damage or destroy your LEDs. In 1997 he mounted 16 strobe lights on a lattice frame and placed it on the top of his camper.
Later that year, he used the same strobe lights, which he encased in a translucent acrylic box, to make “Strobe Matrix,” the earliest piece in the show. The materials and rectangular format coupled with the gallery setting elicit an entirely different reading than the outdoor beacon and declare affinities with minimalism, light art and color-field abstraction.
The exhibit follows in a long line of JCCC shows tracking new developments in abstraction, a theme Hartman began exploring in the 1990s.
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