The field

The exhibition The field gathers for the first time in Europe ¹ the works of Larry Bell (Chicago, 1939) and Liam Everett (Rochester–New York, 1973), two American artists separated by several decades but driven by the same exploration of light as a phenomenon at the same time physical, perceptual and metaphysical.

From the 1960s, Larry Bell, a pioneer of minimal art and research on the materiality of glass, has been leading an in-depth investigation on the optic properties of light. His sculptures in dichroic glass, partially covered in reflecting metallic films, play with the effects of refraction, transparency and opacity. Varying with the spectator’s viewpoint and the light conditions, the volumes seem to metamorphose, revealing a light sculpted, diffracted, trapped. In Larry Bell’s work, the field is no longer that of the canvas but that of the sculptural and architectural space redefined by the light.

For Liam Everett, painting is a territory of experimentation where layers of transparency, texture, and exposure to sunlight, alcohol, salt, or—as in this case—sand, alter and transform the surface, as if subjecting the material to a series of trials. In his most recent works, Liam Everett extends his practice into a dialogue with quantum biology, particularly the vital role of ultraviolet light on living organisms, whether plant or animal. Drawing on data from medical and scientific imaging (MRI scans, spectroscopy, ultra-high-resolution images of atoms and cell structures captured through electron microscopes), his abstract compositions explore a form of the infra-visible: what light carries beyond its luminescence, as a vector of information and vital communica-tion, especially in the form of photons emitted by the sun. This new series simultaneously points to the pictorial structure and to the electromagnetic field traversed by light, where the human body becomes a surface of reception and, metaphorically, the painting itself becomes a field—a space for capturing or isolating the information contained in light.

Larry Bell and Liam Everett’s works have in common to plot a sensitive cartography of luminous fields: visual fields, energetic fields, interpretation fields. Though Liam Everett sees painting as an organism traversed by invisible forces, Larry Bell understands it as a perceptual environment, an interface between space and gaze. Both invite us to rethink our relation to light as an acting, living energy traversing bodies and spaces as much as images.