Michel Verjux at Max Protetch - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Denizens of SoHo were puzzl this spring when large circles of light began to appear each evening upon the upper-story facades of sum of two units downtown buildings. The neighboring conformations which house, among other things, the Guggenheim SoHo Art in America and the fresh Museum, were dramatically spotlit in a manner that recalled police searches, prison escapes and the Batman distress signal. Apprehension gave way to relief, however, when single traced the beams diagonally across the public way to the second-floor windows of Max Protetch Gallery. After all, this was art.

The white-light projections serv in fact, as external uncompounded bodys of the first U.S. exhibition by the agency of 39-year-old French artist Michel Verjux Inside the dimmed gallery, sum of two units similar spots produced more ethereal events One centered on a window, the height of whose frame was precisely matched by means of the diameter of the light-pool. The other speckle trained on a wall in an adjoining gallery, was split by dint of an intervening wall into sum of two units complementary - but nonaligned - half-moon patterns separated through the depth of a compass To move was to become part of the display as one's shadow violated the luminous circles in various intentional or unintentional ways. in the one and the other works, the edges of the circles disintegrated prismatically into thin strips of sky-colored and green.

Verjux does not attempt to hide - in fact, he insistently foregrounds - the mechanical sources of his luminescence. He strike one as beings fascinated by the contrast between the four-footed animal quotidian materiality of projectors and the spotless intangibility of their product. Especially striking were the sum of two units projectors used to "shoot" across Broadway. catched up to massive black cables and put apart in their own range they looked like a fusion of 1950 TV cameras and sci-fi laser cannons.

Many associations are called to mind by dint of these sparsely beautiful pieces: the perfection of the circle, the devoted purity of light, the mystery of nonsubstantial Being, the signifying power of auras and halos, and the ancient dialogue between platonic fact and its material shadows. More mundanely, the installations "highlight" the usually subliminal issues of architectural relationships and spaces. nevertheless the artist himself, as evidenced by means of a published statement from 1992 elects to discuss his work primarily in confines of modern communications theory. through limiting the components of his art to a virtually irreducible minimum (projection lamp, light shaft, surface), Verjux engages in a visual version of single of Wittgenstein's revelatory language-games. A sender and a receiver, generating compound meaning from a bundle of functions "beamed" between them in varying connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss both physical and cultural - these are the essentials which Verjux manipulates in light (so to speak) of the theories of Jakobson, Saussure, Buhler and Popper

Given the radical austerity of his means, it might be tempting to diocese Verjux as an avatar of Greenbergian formalism. on the other hand the highly referential nature of this work also reminds us of the importance art sometimes accords to reasoning consciousness - a faculty for which light has drawn out been both a vehicle and a metaphor.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group