Conceived by Californian artist Doug Wheeler, the first work of “The Illusion of Light” occupies the entire atrium of Palazzo Grassi. Light becomes matter and redefines space and time by eliminating the perceptual markers of the visitor, who is left between a mirage and reality, nature and artifice, fullness and emptiness, moment and duration. In his use of neon lights, Robert Irwin resorts to a more minimal and distanced artistic language to transform space, the setting, through light: the neon tube, a raw industrial material, is left visible. In Dan Flavin’s work, this connection with architecture is consistent with a close relationship with the history of avant-garde art movements, in this case Tatlin, the main representative of Russian Constructivism. With its modest and fragile materials, Vidya Gastaldon’s installation offers a delicate and joyous counterpoint to these approaches to the transformation of space.
As for him, Julio Le Parc, one of the main protagonists of optical art since the 1960s, plays with the hypnotic and kinetic potentialities of light. The light effects of Philippe Parreno’s Marquee refer to a mise en abyme of the system of signs on which the world of entertainment relies. It evokes its transience, its vacuity as well as its power of fascination. Antoni Muntadas and Robert Whitman get onto this notion of fascination of light but focus on its simplest and most modest tool: the light bulb; this ordinary object is transfigured and gives a material shape to the dreamlike dimension of light. Finally, Bruce Conner’s film exerts a fascination tainted by horror: to reveal a vision of the world that is both gloomy and politically committed, the artist used images made by the American government during the atomic bomb tests in 1946 at the Bikini Atoll.

Participating artists: Eija Lijsa, Troy Brauntuch, Marcel Broodthaers, David Clearbout, Bruce Conner, Lafita Echakch, Dan Flavin, Vidya Gastaldon, General Idea, Gilbert & George, Robert Irwin, Bertrand, Lavier Julio le Parc, Antoni Muntadas, Philippe Parreno, Sturtevant Clair, Tabouret Danh, Vo Doug Wheeler, Robert Whitman

 
The works by Sturtevant and Bertrand Lavier stem from radically different approaches, mediums and artistic languages but are here engaged in a dialogue. Both works refer to the history of art (in particular to the American artist Frank Stella), with a dialectic based on black versus colors, darkness versus light. As for her, Claire Tabouret, the youngest artist of the exhibition, refers to the great Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello and attempts to bring to mind all the nuances of lights,
from day to night, in a single painting.
Troy Brauntuch’s black paintings go straight to the heart of darkness, to the limits of the visible, to conjure up the desire to see everything, the visual obsession that permeates our society.
General Idea, on the contrary, uses the blinding quality of white to make apparent the threat of Aids that weighs on us. The works by Marcel Broodthaers and Gilbert & George also deal with our basic fears – in first position death, obviously – but also our strategies to fight these fears. Finally, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s work invites us to an introspective approach. Set between dreams and reality, reason and madness, she evokes the need to conduct an inner search, to change point of view (to
shed light) on our own history.
 
Shadows and light in relation to collective history are also evoked: contemporary Africa in David Claerbout’s video, the Arab Spring in Latifa Echakhch’s work, and colonialism in Danh Vo’s great installation that unfolds over, and transforms, the central room on the piano nobile.
Clearly, the exhibition does not exhaust the vast field of questions posed by contemporary artists on these concepts. However, it encourages the visitors to invent, in absolute freedom and in light of their own intelligence and sensibility, their path between the opposite polarities of black and white, day and night, reality and illusion.
 

Caroline Bourgeois
curator of the exhibition
Born in Switzerland in 1959, Caroline Bourgeois graduated in Psychoanalysis at Paris University in 1984. She was director of the Eric Franck Gallery in Switzerland from 1988 to 1993 and co-director of the Jennifer Flay Gallery from 1995
to 1997. From 1998 to 2001, she worked on contemporary art installations in tube stations in Paris with a number of artists including Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. In 1998 she was appointed to be in charge of the video section of François
Pinault’s collection. In this context she gave the collection broad horizons that enable to trace the history of the moving image through art installations.
In 2001, with the Pinault Collection, she worked on the production team of Pierre Huyghe’s artworks for the Biennale’s French pavilion. She has also worked on a number of independent projects, among which: the video program “Plus
qu’une image” for the first edition of the Nuit Blanche in Paris; the exhibition “Survivre à l’Apartheid” at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie during the Paris photography month on the theme Emergences Résistances Résurgences (2002); the production of the video collection “Point of view: an Anthology of the Moving Image”, in association with New Museum of Contemporary Art (2003) and “Valie Export – an Overview”, a travelling exhibition co-organized with the Centre National de la Photographie (CNP) of Paris (2003-2004).
From 2004 to 2008 she was Artistic Director of the Plateau, a contemporary art centre in Paris, where she curated several exhibitions: “Ralentir Vite”, “Joan Jonas”, “Loris Gréaud”, “Diaz & Riedweg”, “Jean-Michel Sannejouand”, “Archipeinture”, “En Voyage”, “Adel Abdessemed”, “Société Anonyme”, “Nicole Eisenman”, “Dr Curlet reçoit Jos de Gruyter et Harald Thys”, “l’Argent”, “Cao Fei”, “Melik Ohanian”.
Since 2007 she has been curating exhibitions of the Pinault Collection: “Passage du temps” (2007) at Lille’s Tripostal, “Un certain état du monde” (2009) at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, “Qui a peur des artistes?” (2009) in Dinard, “À triple tour” (2013) in Paris. In Venice she has curated “In Praise of Doubt” (2011-2013) and, with Michael Govan, “Prima Materia” (2013-2014) at Punta della Dogana, “The World Belongs to You” (2011), “Madame Fisscher” (2012), and “Voice of Images” (2012-2013) at Palazzo Grassi.

Palazzo Grassi
San Marco
Campo San Samuele
I-3231, Venice
www.palazzograssi.it