ART CITIES:Hong Kong-Leo Villareal

Leo Villareal works with LED lights to create complex, rhythmic artworks for both gallery and public settings. He focuses on identifying the governing structures of systems and is interested in base units such as pixels and binary code. His installations use artist-created code, which constantly changes the frequency, intensity, and patterning of lights through sequencing.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

For “ESCAPE VELOCITY” his first solo exhibition Leo Villareal presents  at Pace Gallery in Hong Kong, three large “Cloud Drawings” and an edition of small “Cloud Drawings”, and three new triptych works, similar to Villareal’s “Signature of the Invisible” recently exhibited by Pace at Art Basel. Villareal works with pixels and binary code to create rhythmic, non-repeating and random compositions in light. Firmly rooted in abstraction and the psychology of perception, his work is purposefully open-ended and ethereal, encouraging viewers to draw their own interpretations. As Villareal says “Art is a distillation of ideas into material through which artists communicate. For me, art has always served as a portal – something that takes the viewer to another place. The epiphany I had was connecting software and ligh. “To add software and code to that and start to sequence the light was very, very profound, but it took me many years to get there”. Each “Cloud Drawing” has its own unique, randomized sequence that evokes natural phenomena through abstract patterns and emergent, unexpected behaviors of monochromatic light. Villareal’s three 4K OLED triptychs, “Evanescence”, “Floating Bodies” and “Corona”, stretch over 30 cm wide and display high-resolution particle animations created with the artist’s custom software that allows him to further extend the clarity and manipulation of light. A delicate black scrim will hang in the gallery, creating a porous boundary between the two series and enhancing the immersive quality of the installation. Since the 1960s, a growing number of artworks have exploited light to frame and create spaces in the built environment. These include Dan Flavin’s space-defining fluorescent light sculptures, James Turrell’s color-saturated voids, Jenny Holzer’s LED-generated texts, and Felix Gonzales-Torres’ strings of lightbulbs. While Villareal’s art acknowledges these forebears, his concepts relate more closely to the instructional wall drawings of Sol LeWitt and the systems-based paintings of Peter Halley.

Info: Pace Gallery, 12/F H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 20/7-7/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.pacegallery.com