‘The topology of neon is part of a whole history in the long story of its charm on people and its loose-knit tendency to glow, and its slightly otherworldly way of being, by its very nature, transformative.
It is a dialogue between a stethoscope and a crystal ball….’
— Cerith Wyn Evans, quoted in Trebuchet, issue 10.
Extract from press materials: For Borrowed Light Through Metz, Cerith Wyn Evans presents his first solo exhibition in a French institution since his 2006 show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (ARC). Transforming the Forum and Gallery 3, he brings together light and sound works to occasion mises-en-scene of radiant visual and aural effects. Like characters in a repertory theater, older works return and interact with recent works to generate new scenarios. Each work remains singular yet the artist places them in concert in such a way that the exhibition constantly mutates as if animated by an inner life.
In the Forum of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a “winter garden” presents works that, among other themes, blurs the boundaries between nature and culture. At the same time, the garden plays off Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines’s architecture that folds the outside inside and the inside out. For this installation, the artist fills the ground level space with plants that bathe in natural sunlight coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Amidst the plants, two columns made from tubes of filament light bulbs, recall the paper tubes for which Shigeru Ban, has become famous. Like enormously tall glass trees, they stretch up to the 35-meter-high ceiling. The columns on this occasion will not consciously transmit light. They are a silent sign, evoking the inevitable progress of technology. Also in the Forum, large amethyst geodes set in glass crates act as guides to the dialogue between the natural and the social.
In an atmosphere significantly different from that of the winter garden, Cerith Wyn Evans turns the third-floor gallery into what he calls a “stroll garden”. Here, the artist covers the 80-meter-long walls with mirrors and uncovers the large windows at either end of the gallery so that the outside light and views borrowed from Metz become active elements in the exhibit. The unfocused light emanating from the sculptures create electrifying effects as they bounce off the mirrors. The luminous and sonorous works appear to express an interior vital force. For example, five columns made of LED bulbs slowly light up to a blinding full intensity and fade off to total transparency at a pace that gives the impression they are calmly breathing. This work echoes the nearby transparent glass sculpture with crystal flutes that inhale and exhale the surrounding air according to a programmed algorithmic design. The flutes perform on their own, emitting eerie drone-like sounds. While playing the flute or making hand-blown glass usually requires human breath, here the human body has disappeared, and the artwork has found its own voice. Suspended abstract neon drawings in light based on traditional Japanese Noh theater seem to perform a frenetic dance.
November 1, 2024 – April 14, 2025
Centre Pompidou, Metz
Metz, France
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
