<p><span style=""></span></p><p><span style=""></span></p><p>The Welsh artist evokes Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp in double exhibitions at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris and New York</p>

Matthieu Jacquet

Cerith Wyn Evans’s luminous and poetic ballets

<p>In collaboration with <em>Numéro art</em></p><p>Milan, late October, 2019: At the Pirelli Foundation, visitors discovered seven 20-meter-high luminous columns rising in the giant space of the HangarBicocca. These impressive sculptures made of vertical fluorescent tubes immediately hinted at ancient architecture, especially the Doric order found in ancient Greek temples. Yet, the show didn’t stop there; in the darkness of the former warehouse, the artworks were gradually switched on and off to create a captivating visual ballet for the viewer. It was with that cathedral-inspired installation that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9870/Cerith-Wyn-Evans">Cerith Wyn Evans</a> introduced his major solo exhibition in the Italian institution, asserting from the start the stakes of his practice – exploring the links between light, sound, and space to write a multisensory poetry. </p><p>More than three years later, the Welsh artist once again presents a smaller version of these columns in the basement of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1198/Marian-Goodman-Gallery">Marian Goodman Gallery</a> in Paris, which is dedicating a solo exhibition to him until February 25, hand in hand with one at the gallery’s New York branch (until March 4). Thanks to new artworks designed for the exhibitions, his artistic practice is enriched by several explicit references to artists who have made an impression on him, from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7557/Frank-Stella">Frank Stella</a>&nbsp;to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7356/Marcel-Duchamp">Marcel Duchamp</a>.</p>

<p>Cerith Wyn Evans has been drawing with light for almost thirty years now. Although the discreet British artist began his career in the 1970s with experimental short films, neon lights have since become one of his main and most noted media of expression. Mesmerized by illuminated shop signs, the artist has utilized neon lights throughout his career to draw abstract lines in empty spaces, to write poetic phrases flirting with aphorisms, or to literally light up imposing chandeliers. In the first room of the exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, some of the new luminous assemblages he started in 2021 respond to each other. But here, the neon lights are aligned on a flat surface and form a floating staggered canvas of light. Straight, oblique, and geometric, the superimposed lines seem to vibrate in the viewer’s eyes. The stage is set. Behind this seemingly arid frame and industrial material, Wyn Evans breathes his soul into the abstract, letting the neons come to life according to different points of view and the variations in intensity and color.</p>

<p>Keen eyes familiar with 20<sup>th</sup>-century painting are likely to notice that the patterns drawn by these luminous structures explicitly refer to Frank Stella’s ‘Black Paintings’, a series of paintings made by the American artist between 1958 and 1960. In his new pieces, Wyn Evans translates the American painter’s black stripes separated by white lines into neon lights. The old opaque canvas now becomes an open, porous surface in which viewers are invited to let their eyes wander between the thin luminescent cylinders in the exhibition space and the building’s inner courtyard, visible through the large arched windows. The Welsh artist’s skillful pastiche allows him to both embrace and offer an adaptation of the original artwork.</p><p>The first basement room highlights his approach with a dozen cracked windscreens floating in the air thanks to wires placed around the light columns. Recalling Alexander Calder’s signature 1932 sculptures of the same name, these ‘mobiles’ swap the plain metal pieces for laminated glass car parts salvaged from a rubbish dump near Paris. Just like Duchamp’s unfinished work <em style="background-color: initial;">The Large Glass, </em>created by the French artist between 1915 and 1923, Wyn Evans is intent on preserving the frailty of the delicate material. These new readings of ‘readymades’, evoking television screens with their rectangular shape and bluish color, now meet the architectural canons of ancient Greece and joyfully play with anachronisms in a spatial dimension.</p>

<p>Wyn Evans has taken on the role of conductor of light. The exhibition can be read as a spatial music sheet, where the visitor’s path is meticulously controlled by the artist and seems to mirror the lines traced by the artworks. Wyn Evans’s pieces are more akin to Jesús-Rafael Soto’s colorful installations, which invite the visitor to wander between them, than to Dan Flavin’s neon lights, which are often displayed against a wall, motionless. </p><p>A sense of theatricality keeps unfolding with the combination of the LED columns and mobile windscreens, which tenfold their luminous melody through their endless reflections. The artist’s magic goes even further with the reversal he operates throughout the exhibition. While the lights of the static panels come to life as the visitor walks across the room of the ground floor, the works activates themselves around the immobile viewer in the basement, thus suddenly reversing the gravitational.</p><p>As usual, the Welsh artist does not hesitate to sow seeds of doubt in the visitor’s mind with the presence of few gray areas. A pine tree in a pot turning on itself, a gong wrapped in a silver blanket, and transparent chairs punctuated by the beat of piano compositions. If the Paris exhibition is entitled ‘no realm of thought...’, its New York counterpart may be a key to the enigma with its title ‘...no field of vision’. The phenomenological approach of the artist is clear and fully assumed. Rather than locking his artworks into a discourse, Wyn Evans offers them to the viewers’ consciousness and sensory perception, like independent organs in the here and now of their unique experience. </p>

<p>This article is part of a yearlong collaboration between Paris+ par Art Basel and <em style="background-color: initial;">Numéro art</em>. Click&nbsp;<a href="https://www.numero.com/fr/art/cerith-wyn-evans-galerie-marian-goodman-exposition-paris">here</a> to read&nbsp;the original article.</p><p>Cerith Wyn Evans is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1198/Marian-Goodman-Gallery">Marian Goodman Gallery</a> (New York, London, Paris), <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1316/White-Cube">White Cube</a> (London, Hong Kong, Palm Beach) and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1448/Taka-Ishii-Gallery">Taka Ishii Gallery</a> (Tokyo).</p><p>‘no realm of thought...’<br />Until February 25, 2023<br />Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris</p><p>‘...no field of vision’<br />Until March 4, 2023<br />Marian Goodman Gallery, New York</p><p>Matthieu Jacquet is a journalist and art critic based in Paris. He writes about art and fashion for <em style="background-color: initial;">Numéro </em>and <em style="background-color: initial;">Numéro art</em>.</p><p>English translation: Emma Naroumbo Armaing.</p><p>Published on February 7, 2023.</p><p>Caption for full-bleed images:&nbsp;Installation views of Cerith Wyn Evans’s exhibition&nbsp;‘no realm of thought...’, Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.</p>

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The Welsh artist evokes Frank Stella, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp in double exhibitions at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris and New York

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