Olafur Eliasson: “Your light spectrum and presence”

Showing at Los Angeles' Tanya Bonakdar Gallery from February 5th – April 2nd, 2022

17 Feb 2022

‘Geometrically speaking, a rainbow is actually a circle. If the earth were not in the way, if there were no horizon blocking your view, you would see the whole round rainbow as a perfect circle wrapping around you, with your eye at its center. Two people standing even a few meters apart will perceive two different rainbows, each oriented to their own perspective. We can never see the other person’s rainbow. You could almost say that a rainbow, as an ephemeral phenomenon, confirms my existence. If there is a rainbow, then there must be an I who is seeing it.’ – Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson’s Your light spectrum and presence features eleven circular paintings, created between 2012 and 2021 that represent Eliasson’s long-standing investigation with light, color and the ways we perceive and interact with our surroundings. Known collectively as the ‘colour experiment’ series and numbered sequentially, these circular canvases strive to challenge our expectations and encourage our eyes to stay in constant motion.

Eliasson began his ongoing ‘color experiment’ series in 2009, inspired by the idea of producing a new, comprehensive color theory that would comprise all the visible colors of the prism. He began by working with a color chemist in an attempt to mix an exact tone of paint for each nanometer of light in the spectrum, which ranges in frequency from approximately 390 to 700 nanometers.

Since those initial experiments, Eliasson has created compositions that range from simple explorations of the spectrum, such as commissions for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the MCA Chicago, to more complex efforts to capture the light of a specific moment, in a specific place. Light measurements: Reykjavik, 20 March 2011, 13:00 GMT (2012), represents the latter, converting the specific mix of color in the daylight as measured in Reykjavik on March 20, 2011, at 1 pm. The color palette is based on the wavelengths of light visible at the time, and the composition of the painting reflects the proportion of the various hues measured. The result is a unique asymmetrical pattern of color that represents the daylight throughout the course of that particular moment. Studying these differences in light suggests our perception of the world is highly individual, based on our locations, our experiences and our unique vantage points.

Several paintings in Your light spectrum and presence feature the bright spectrum of color seen in the natural phenomena of a rainbow, a recurring motif throughout Eliasson’s practice

Eliasson has also taken inspiration from the work of JMW Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and Claude Monet, all masters of landscape painting who were radicals in their time for their stylistic and atmospheric representation of landscape. Eliasson dematerializes the represented landscapes of these artists by analyzing the light and color levels in specific paintings. While working on Colour experiment no. 87, based on Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818), Eliasson analyzed the color, light, hue, saturation and spectrographic color division to create the painting’s seamless gradients of color, painted layer by layer by hand over three years.

In this latest body of works, Eliasson addresses the notion of light in darkness. The background of the painting is black, creating a hypothetical and unnatural isolation of a rainbow encompassed by nothingness. However, the void in the center is not completely absent of visible light, instead the viewer recognizes various subtle shades of deep blues and purples, slowly bringing the eye to the bordering spectrum of color. Scaled approximately to the proportions of a human body, the paintings allow the viewer to be surrounded by a glorious rainbow.