A cascade of luminous points suspended from the finest strands of transparent polycarbonate: a house woven of sinuous threads of light; a picture drawn by a rigorous polychromy capable of suggesting disorienting depths: these are the winners of the Targetti Light Art Award, all under the banner of the formal discretion and magic offered only by light. Light Art is Targetti’s international competition that puts the spotlight on research and experimental work of young artists from around the world who use artificial light as a medium of expression.

 

Pawel Pomorski, Tamar Frank, and Anila Rubiku, winners of the fourth edition of the Award, are at ArteFiera to celebrate their success and to toast the first eight “light-years” of the Targetti Light Art Collection, which at the Bologna fair is also presenting the latest work by Fabrizio Plessi (“Identikit”) and the first “historical piece” in the collection, commissioned by Artistic Director Amnon Barzel from one of the great masters of Arte Povera, Gilberto Zorio. Names from the art history books are thus exhibiting at the heart of the trade fair, together with young creative talents who, often, have not yet made the galleries or attracted critical notice. “We have built our collection [editors note: one of the world’s most important in the field of Light Art] not on the star artists but on the quality of the single projects: our objective is to speak to people of the extraordinary creative power of light,” explains Paolo Targetti, President of the company of the same name. “This does not mean - he adds - that we are not honored by the participation in our project of artists of the caliber of Plessi, Zorio, Nagasawa, Poirier, and Eliasson, the young Icelander discovered by our Amnon Barzel in the mid-Nineties who has gone on to become the light artist most acclaimed by museums all around the world.”

So it’s an easy bet that the futures of these three young talents from Poland, Holland, and Albania will be “luminous.” The first to pick them out were the members of the Award Jury, composed of Amnon Barzel (founder of the Museo Pecci and the Jüdische Museum of Berlin), Omar Calabrese (semeiologist), Danilo Eccher (Director of the Macro), Alessandra Mammì (L’espresso correspondent), and Lara Vinca Masini (art critic), who awarded the artists a € 25.000 purse and their works a place of honor at all the exhibitions of the Targetti Light Art Collection: an opportunity akin to winning a tournée touching on all the world’s most important museums. This is what was reserved for the winners of past editions, whose works have been exhibited (at the magnificent permanent home of the collection in a Medici villa in the Florence hills) as well as at the Chelsea Art Museum of New York, in the Crypt of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and under the stained glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, at Vienna’s MAK (at the same time as the presentation of the latest installation realized in Europe by the great James Turrell) and at the Centre for Contemporary Art of Warsaw, at the Galleria Marella of Milan, and at London’s Workplace. A quite respectable biography for a collection that began almost for sport, as a last-ditch effort to communicate the decisive importance of light - understood as “construction material” and extremely powerful emotional vector - to the architects. Recounting this adventure is a book (just out from Skira) presented for the first time at ArteFiera. It is entitled Light Art and is entirely dedicated to light, which is explored from the critical standpoint (in the lengthy introductory essay in which Amnon Barzel narrates the extraordinary and inexorable role that light has played in the history of art from prehistory to our times, and in Consuelo de Gara’s interview with James Turrell) and in an experimental key, with the works created by artists using the most divers types of light sources.

 

ArteFiera is celebrating in light this year: the appointment for our toast is for Saturday, 28 January at 4:30 p.m. in the gallery linking pavilions 16, 21, and 22.