Green light for the celebrations for the tenth year of the Targetti Light Art Collection, the collection of artworks by established international artists and emerging creative talents for whom artificial light is a medium, a tool for expression, and the primary content of their art. In 1997, the art critic Amnon Barzel, implementing an idea by Paolo Targetti, invited artists of the caliber of Olafur Eliasson, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, and Gilberto Zorioto to create light works on commission.

Year by year, that first nucleus of nine works expanded with acquisitions of works by other art-stars like Fabrizio Plessi and Anne et Patrick Poirier and by young creative talents from all over the world, selected among the participants in an international contest with a biennial cadence, now in the final phase of its fifth edition.

 

Over the course of these ten years, the collection – managed and entirely funded by the Targetti Group – has become one of the world’s most prestigious showcases for Light Art. The first exhibition, held in the crypt of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence in 1998, was followed by an itinerant show that has taken the works to such premier international museums as the Chelsea Art Museum of New York, Vienna’s MAK, and the MAUR of Moscow and soon, with the proud addition of a new work created on commission by one of the world’s best-known light artists, will be continuing on to Paris, Copenhagen, and Istanbul.

 

“Lighting” – this is the title of the new work (see images 1 and 2) – is signed by Brigitte Kowanz, a Viennese artist who for almost thirty years has been working with artificial light to create suggestive light boxes and sophisticated architectural installations. Guiding the artist’s research is her abiding interest in the world of science: Brigitte is one of the few artists who interact on a daily basis with physicists, neurologists, and mathematicians, transforming their methods and their academic discoveries into a language based essentially on space-perception phenomena.

 

Kowanz plays with space, compressing and expanding it through skilful use of mirrors and lights, offering the spectator a vision of a world as real and scientifically explicable as it is magical and estranging. Her works do not turn on facile optical effects but rather on the physical and neurological mechanisms of perception that are activated, beginning with the interrelation of the optical stimulus and the semantic messages she so often writes in neon tubes and then fragments and infinitely multiplies in mirror reflections.

 

By so doing, more than showing the spectators their own reflections, she addresses the theme of the inherent fragility of the current concept of truth and invites the spectator to consider the magical component of things as being at least as significant as the physical, concrete manifestation. Not by chance, Blast, one of the scholars who knows her best, cites Theodor Adorno when speaking of Brigitte Kowanz’s works: “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”