Since 2009, Adrien Lucca has been developing a body of work around colour and light. In his artistic practice, at the intersection of art and science, he questions our perception and experience of the physical world. Over the years, he has set up a research and production laboratory where he produces his works, using chemistry, spectrometry, electronics and computers.
THE LIGHT OBSERVER : Your artworks are all related to colour and light, which I believe we can say are your main fields of research and expression. What drew you to them in the first place?
ADRIEN LUCCA : It happened in two steps. Firstly, when I was in high school. At the time I wanted to become a music composer. I got my first computer when I was fourteen and I saw something on TV about electronic music. I got super excited and started to compose my own music with my computer and a cheap microphone. That was in 1998, I believe. In school we were studying the physics of light and I made a connection between light and sound. About ten years later, in 2009, I was making geometric drawings, trying to somehow find the same logic as in my sound compositions, using colours. I have to say that in between I switched from the desire to make music to the desire to make visual art. However, I quickly figured out that I didn’t really know how to control my results with colours. My colours were not as precise as my sound frequencies were before. So I decided to stop everything and to focus on the study of light and colour. I read as many books as I could, and in a new notebook, I wrote down everything I thought I knew and everything I knew I didn’t know — I started by working on that. At the same time, I conducted experiments for myself, on the side, which eventually became artworks. I also contacted some scientists and attended conferences on the subject. So, it all started by a long phase of study, in which I still am somehow, as I’m always learning and conducting new experiments.
How would you say research became an integral part of your artistic approach?
I may have gotten that from music. Some composers publish their studies as musical pieces and I was pretty inspired by this idea. In my drawings, I try to include some elements of how it’s been made, what it refers to, what concepts are triggering the very idea of an artwork, into the artwork itself. Many of these works are unfinished. I like to stop one step before what could be the end. It may be richer in terms of interpretation as well. More importantly, having developed an artistic practice based on the scientific study of colour and light has led to a necessity to constantly increase my scientific knowledge and my collection of material and scientific devices. My ideas and my artwork are the products of a process in which I only consider what can actually be done, in technical terms, using colour and light. Sometimes I say: the more I study the more I can develop magical powers for my artwork.
Speaking of memory, light tells us a lot about our universe’s history. Light has also very practical applications, such as lasers used for optical fibre or CD and DVD technology. How do you use light in your work? What meaning does it reveal for you?
I am particularly interested in the notion of “artificial darkness”, a concept that is associated with a technological society that creates luminous experiences in shadowed spaces. I am obviously referencing the darkened halls of the movie theatre, but also museums, galleries and art spaces where we find an increasing amount of projection-based artwork. I feel most comfortable as an artist working in the artificial darkness of these new contemporary spaces.
You have a studio, which is also a laboratory, filled with numerous machines. What kind of experiments do you do there, what kind of equipment do you use?
The studio is full of electronic devices, drawings, and materials. Precision scales that work at 1/10 of a milligram, an inkjet plotter filled with non-standard inks, a 3d printer, prototypes of future devices, drawing instruments, electronic equipment, a large collection of LEDs, etc. — that’s for the “clean part” of the studio. In another room I have a chemistry lab, where I make my own paints. I have a large collection of pigments, about 500 different types of them, but also glass samples, mixers, resins, machines to crush the pigments, weighing scales, spectrophotometers to measure the characteristics of coatings and others to measure the composition of light. I can calculate the effect of light on a material. For example, when I make a type of paint with pigments, I measure the reflectance of the paint, which is the percentage of the wavelengths that will be reflected by it. With this information I can simulate the colours of this paint under any type of light. Finally, in a 3rd room, I have a wood and metal workshop with many machines including a CNC machine. Most importantly, all the things I have are interconnected by the means of software. We develop our own software here in the studio. They allow me to deal with all those parameters (the composition of light, the characteristics of the different materials, their interaction, etc.). I also use my own software to draw things in 2D and 3D, for example. Not a single work comes out of my studio without having been entirely designed using my own homemade software.
You work with tools that are also used by scientists. How do art and science intertwine in your work?
What I’m trying to do is to explore our representation, our thinking of the world. I want to question what we think is around us by finding ways to show that our world is extraordinary. And I try to propose visual experiences that we may think impossible. Something science over the course of history has done many times. I create situations where one will perceive something strange and surprising that will change his or her representation of the world.
As you said, you have a lot of machines and software with complex algorithms that allow you to measure and control things, yet do you welcome randomness in your work?
I was including accidents and stuff like that when I was composing music a long time ago, but eventually I decided to stop working this way. I find it too easy and even banal. I usually don’t accept publishing or making public works that are produced by mistake or by chance. However, inside the conception of a work, I develop strategies that let the algorithms make decisions independent of my will. To my eyes there’s a big difference between creating a space for randomness — which is what I try to do sometimes — and developing an aesthetic around unintentional mistakes and “strokes of luck” — which I see as a non-sustainable artistic stance.
You started with your attraction to electronic music. How do you work with colours today? Does it have something to do with musical composition?
I’m not searching for some kind of harmony. It may be close to some forms of modern or contemporary music because I’m thinking in sequences, variations… Often working in-situ, I’m trying to use the world itself to create these variations. For example, in Rome, “Dentelles de lumière” is a glass piece I made three years ago. This work is constantly changing because of the course of the sun. I studied light in-situ and selected some materials that react with light at different moments. Sometimes they appear very bright, then they disappear. For me, this variation is the most important feature of the work. I don’t like things that repeat themselves in the same way, or things that are too symmetrical. I’m drawn to the idea of progression: while time passes something is happening, an event. This is how I compose and how a space is given to randomness, via this notion of “event”.
Has your perception of colours changed over time? It’s a very intimate subject; colour perception has much to do with emotions. By assembling and working with colours, what did you learn?
When I worked with glass for my project Soleil de minuit, I discovered that there are colours that you can’t obtain with any other medium, which was a very interesting experience. I also worked with LED, LED and pigments, and I experienced surprising colour sensations that are beyond classical situations. For example, I’ve seen some shades of red that are stunning, as pure as the red of a laser pointer, but which seem to be the colour of an object rather than that of a light. I also have learned to understand colours as mixtures of light wavelengths. It’s surprising how the human eye can be very sensitive to small variations in some wavelengths and not perceive any variations in others, or how some wavelengths produce extremely colourful sensations while others are nearly achromatic, nearly white in comparison.
You mentioned Soleil de minuit. I’m wondering how you succeeded in obtaining the actual result you had in mind? As you said, glass has its own way of reacting to light and each piece is always slightly different from one to another, thus it’s difficult to know in advance what the composition will look like.
I made an algorithm to select types of glass based on their physical properties. I preferred not to work with the manufacturer’s standard catalogue. Instead, I went to a factory’s storage room and I scanned about 400 different pieces of antique glass sheets — they had about 5,000 types of glass in stock. I then worked on my algorithm for three months, and eventually sent them an email with a precise list of everything I needed. I could have done this job even if I was blind — it was not based on my perception but on the properties of the material and colours. The algorithm itself was creating pictures based on a physical model of the appearance of sunlight. The glass panels are composed of many different tiny pieces of glass and their compositions represent the sun with a sort of crown as well as yellow, orange and red tones based on a phenomenon called chromatic aberration. The result is a kind of blurry image of the sun. So much for the theory. In reality, each piece of glass was unique and we had to invent a way to work with their irregularities. I asked the glass studio I worked with to mix the glasses by colour and place them without looking at them so their differences would even out.
I wanted to ask you why drawing is so important to you. It could just be a part of your process, but it occupies a central role in your body of work.
I like the idea that a drawing can be very impressive even though it costs little. Most importantly there is the possibility to erase, to stop whenever you want. I like the freedom that it allows. It’s touching. It’s made by hand. It’s almost a form of writing and it’s a direct expression of your thinking on paper. For all these reasons drawing is a very pure form of expression for me. Drawings are also easy to transport, they do not take up a lot of space. I also like the idea that I can have all my work in a folder, a bit like Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise. Furthermore, drawing has its own history, not only do artists produce drawings, there are also wonderful examples of scientific drawings of plants, animals, maps, planets, etc. I prefer to be associated with this “family” rather than the world of painting, which has heavy connotations. Again, it’s about freedom, I feel freer on paper than on canvas.
You are making a lot of installations too. How do you present them to the public? Is it something you reflect on a lot before showcasing?
I made an important piece in 2019, which presented two large, inflated balloons, placed directly on the floor in a white room illuminated by white light. The piece is called Yellow zone/yellow-free zone. When people enter the room, they see one red and one yellow balloon, or two red, or two yellow balloons. There is no further explanation. When the public moves them, they discover that the two balloons are the same colour. The light is different on each side of the room, but it looks identical. The balloons change in colour depending on where they are in the room, even though it is hard to imagine this change in colour is likely to happen. Before the public moves the balloons, the work is invisible. If the public does not participate, the work is not experienced. Of course, it’s something that works immediately with children. That work is important for me because before making it, I didn’t have a clear understanding of how I wanted to deal with the public. It’s difficult to plan the public’s reaction and I was worried that too many people would miss the point of the work. However, instead of explaining how things are or how they work, I just proposed an experience and let the public make it happen — or not. I stopped worrying and told myself: trust the public and the work, give the public a chance to use their own curiosity and intelligence instead of worrying about the potential invisibility of the work. This is still how I think about installations and the public today.
What are you working on at the moment?
For the past two years, I have been working on a “programmable white light synthesizer”. That’s a light emitting device, similar to the lights I used for the balloons I mentioned previously, but it is a more advanced version of it. For example, I have this project that will be created in Brussels, at Le Botanique. They asked me for an artwork for the entrance of the building. I plan on replacing the light of the building’s lobby with my synthesizers. The light will look normal, yet at some point every object in the lobby will become black, white or grey, a moment later everything will appear in colour again. All the objects and walls will be painted with specific colours that I developed to create this colour-changing phenomenon induced by a programmed white light. I studied a way to mix pigments to make their colour very sensitive to this light, so they can change dramatically. A type of paint might appear brown in daylight, but can turn green and then completely red under my light synthesizer. I’ve been working intensively on this for the past two years and I’m now thinking of using light to change natural colours as well: flowers, human skin colour and maybe some experiences with food as well. All this research will be shown during my first solo museum show at BPS22 in Charleroi.
