Robert Irwin

A pioneer of the 1960s West Coast Light and Space movement, Robert Irwin has long been an inspiration for younger artists—such as Olafur Eliasson—whose multisensory installations are likewise predicated on a phenomenological approach. Now in his early eighties, Irwin presents his first solo gallery exhibition in France, titled “Way Out West” and consisting of six impressive new works that extend his investigation of the relationships between light, shade, color, and space. Each piece comprises a row of vertically grouped fluorescent tubes covered with gels of various hues, forming preset color combinations controlled with the flick of a switch. Every setting generates a startlingly different ambience—harsh and strident in the case of a preponderance of brilliant blue, yellow, and green hues, solemn and elegiac in the case of softly glistening grays, golds, and greens. Complex tones, textures, and overlapping regions of effulgence and shade are likewise conjured up by these deceptively simple works: The direct light from the tubes mingles with its own reflections on the surrounding walls and on the white ridges of the supporting structure, which in turn cast evanescent shadows that further enhance the complex interplay among the pieces’ various elements.

Abolishing figure-ground relationships and lacking a focal point, the dense fields of light making up these experiential works also highlight the disjunction between that which is known and that which is perceived: Seemingly stable colors become more or less intense depending on the angle from which they are viewed, while the almost palpable velvety glow suffusing the spaces between the fixtures, or the yellowish tinge that appears to run down the side of a blue tube, exist only in the beholder’s eye. By deconstructing the processes of perception, Irwin allows us to see how we see.