Robert Irwin @ White Cube, Paris

Installation View, White Cube, Paris

My first encounter with the light sculptures of American artist Robert Irwin in the early 1990s was a revelation. I remember walking into a Soho gallery and being mesmerized by the interaction of fluorescent light and scrims for the first time, recognizing the concerns of painting extended beyond the four sides of a framed canvas. The predominantly white light, at times broken by red tape, at others by metal obstructions, changing intensity and hue depending on where I stood in the gallery, the angle through which I was placed in relation to the scrims. The work resonated so strongly with Mondrian, with hazy photographs, and the blur of Monet's vision. I immediately saw Irwin's installations as modernist painting in light. 

Robert Irwin, Legacy #3, 2012

Together with artists such as James Turrell and Dan Flavin, Irwin not only invented a new kind of experiential light art, but they expanded our conceptions of light, colour, and their interactions with space of a gallery. By extension, these works brought new dimension to our understanding of our perception as viewers. No longer was light used to illuminate a thing in the world or an object on a canvas, but for these artists, light was the thing itself. Light took on a material, became the subject of the art work. Light didn't simply stand in for someone as it did for Caravaggio in The Calling of Saint Matthew—light became the medium and meaning of the work.

Robert Irwin, Basie's Basement, 2015

Irwin does something a little different from Turrell and Flavin because his primary motivation is not to create spaces through light, although that eventuates. His concern is more about how light is used and manipulated to shift the ways that we see.  In this exhibition at White Cube, Paris, some of Irwin's last  works, fluorescent light sculptures are vertically attached to walls, some turned on, others masked with vertical strips of tape, interrupting, but also creating colour fields in which diverse colours come into dynamic rhythms of communication, shifting as we move around the space. Natural light floods through the gallery windows on the first floor of a Parisian building, prompting us to reflect on its interaction with the artificial, the illusions created through looking. And as we move around, we realize that there is an absence of a fixed single place from which to stand to observe the truth of what we see when colours mutate. The interactions of light, both clashing and in concert, dance and vibrate as vigorously as the world around us. 

Robert Irwin, #6 x 8", 2015

The gallery flyer tells of a connection between Irwin's work and abstract expressionism because Irwin began as an abstract expressionist. Of course, we immediately see the push to create colour as subject, but for me, the strongest connection to painting is to the pop art of someone such as Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein painted brushstrokes that reduced the use of paint to the process and subject of the work. The brushstroke is not in the service of depicting something else, it's the thing, the work of art itself. We could say that Irwin is doing the same with light. Light no longer creates meaning of something, it is the meaning of the artwork for Irwin. While Lichtenstein pokes fun at the supposed authenticity of the abstract expressionist aesthetic, Irwin pushes art outside of the abstract expressionist frame altogether.  He moves away from a focus on an expression from the unconscious to a reflection on the viewer's physical experience of seeing in space. For this innovative use of fluorescent light, Irwin was a unique artist who has left his mark.