Light Show - Sometimes it pays to look into the light

CHARLES DARWENT        Sunday 10 February 2013

“The light here is electric, which is to say artificial, which is to say new. Underlying all the work in Light Show is a Promethean anxiety, a wonder at (and lurking fear of) modern man's ability to make light for himself. Light is what we see by: no light, no vision. If that light is artificial, then so, potentially, is what it allows us to see. Something at the heart of the way we believe – an idea of enlightenment, of revelation through light – is made uncertain. We are like the captives in Plato's cave, only worse, seeing what we see more brightly than they do, but with all the less assurance that it is real. Phew. If that sounds as though Light Show is going to make for heavy viewing, then the opposite is true. The art in it tends towards the twinkly. Thus the first work you see as you walk in, Leo Villareal's Cylinder II – a 20-foot column of white LEDs, bubbling effervescently like a 7-Up ad. Villareal's work could be at Piccadilly Circus, except that all it advertises is itself. That, I guess, is the point. Cylinder II seems to be telling us something, selling us something. But in the end it is merely pretty, a closed loop, a self-answering question.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/art-review-light-show--sometimes-it-pays-to-look-into-the-light-8488414.html?origin=internalSearch