Michel Verjux

A arte Studio Invernizzi, Milan
Through December 21

In the early ’80s Michel Verjux introduced a new theme into his work: clusters of projected light beams that occupy an environment according to preplanned configurations, constituting a metalanguage that questions the myriad levels of perceived reality.

The artist exploits the semantic potential of light as matter/nonmatter, its capacity to fill up emptiness with an apparent absence of physicality. The formal content of the luminous bundles, adapted to each spatial arrangement with regular geometry, highlights the most subtle architectonic aspects of the surrounding space.

In the Milanese gallery, circles played across the walls and ceiling, their regular shape animated and fractured by the preexisting angles and pillars of the space. The installation also involved the outside world—during evening hours the luminous projections extended out through the gallery windows.

The artist also raises the issue of perception, bringing the observer into a dialogue with the setting and with the aesthetic dimension created when the light meets the gallery’s white walls.

While at the end of the nineteenth century post-impressionist painters exploited the potential of color to capture effects of light, Verjux initiates an inverse operation. Somewhere in the visible realm between ultraviolet and infrared beams, the artist produces colorful ciphers that exalt the aesthetic dimension of light and its chromatic weight.




Elena Di Raddo
Translation by Amanda Coulson