The Soul of James Turrell
The reappearance of the work of the American artist James Turrell (Pasadena, LA, 1943) in Paris has caused great expectation. The Gagosian Gallery in Le Bourget, near the Air Museum, has presented the exhibition “James Turrell: At One”, which can be visited until summer 2025. This exhibition consists of more than thirty works including luminous murals, projections, photographs, holograms, models and plans of his Roden Crater in Arizona.
The reappearance of the work of the American artist James Turrell (Pasadena, LA, 1943) in Paris has caused great expectation. The Gagosian Gallery in Le Bourget, near the Air Museum, has presented the exhibition “James Turrell: At One”, which can be visited until summer 2025. This exhibition consists of more than thirty works including luminous murals, projections, photographs, holograms, models and plans of his Roden Crater in Arizona. I would highlight the light projections Either Or 2024, from his Wedgework series of 1969. But undoubtedly the installation of All Clear from Ganzfeld is a unique experience. Going up some stairs, having previously taken off one’s shoes, one enters a completely white room generated by LED backlighting, which permeates the whole space, in which one loses orientation by not perceiving the limits of the space. The absence of indicators of depth, form and distance makes the space dissolve, producing a fascinating experience, since we lose the spatio-temporal control to which we are accustomed.
The artist James Turrell, in the 1960s, was a pioneer, together with other artists of Southern California, in the use of sensory phenomena such as perception, light and space as a creative medium for his work. This interest in these elements has not decreased over time but rather has intensified. He has been bringing the most advanced technology in these fields to his work, increasing the intensity of the aesthetic experience in the observer. This skill comes from his studies in the field of the psychology of perception, mathematics, geology and astronomy.
The first time I had an encounter with the work of James Turrell was in Varese, near Milan. In this Italian city is the Villa Panza, which was the residence until his death of one of the great patrons and collectors of contemporary art in history, Count Panza di Biumo. Currently the Villa, converted into a contemporary art center, houses part of his magnificent collection and remains one of those iconic places in the art world that is worth visiting.
James Turrell. Skyspace I (1973). Image via: Guggenheim.com
In the 1950s, at a time when the European art world was not so attentive to what was happening in the United States, Panza introduced into his museums, with an avant-garde vision, the most outstanding artists of abstract expressionism, minimalism, pop art or conceptual art. In the 1970s Panza was the first to commission Turrell, for his 18th-century Italian palace, a skyspace, his well-known openings in architecture that open windows to the sky, bringing art to nature or rather, bringing nature to art. Now this work is in more than eighty countries around the world. But he also made other works for the Villa in which, through the interaction of space with light, he plays with our senses and perceptions.
But his masterpiece begins with the adventure started in 1974, Roden Crater. This is the year of its discovery after having flown over many areas to find the right place. Turrell is an experienced pilot who got his license when he was only sixteen years old. This Land Art work is an extinct volcano, a natural volcanic-cone crater located in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona. He has created a natural observatory of celestial events. Passages and spaces that have required special engineering to build it on red and black ash. In interaction with the variations of light from the sky and the heavenly bodies, one can directly experience the cycles of geological and celestial time.
Turrell’s artistic creations are clad in a spiritual halo that bears witness to humanity’s strivings to transcend the merely given. The observation of these poetic works privileges the experience that opens to imagination and feelings, entering a mystical state of intense contemplation.
The primitive cult of the forces of the sky such as the sun, light, the stars or the wind is ancestral. Hinduism (1st millennium BC), for example, through the ascetic exercises that lead to self-absorption, is oriented toward intuitive and mystical experience. This is how the Hindu feels his union with the essence of reality. Zen Buddhism is based on the contemplative meditation of emptiness, which leads him to a control of the mind, achieving peace and harmonious fusion with nature.
Turrell’s art invites contemplation, and arouses feelings of peace, of awe, of transcendence and wonder. It invites us to relate to nature through artistic creation, to observe it from another perspective, and also to play with our senses through light and space. It has much of the sacred about it, as if we were entering temples. Turrell prompts us, with the beauty of his art, to contemplation and self-reflection, moving the spirit. A subjective and immediate experience of being conscious, feeling, perceiving and experiencing the world in the first person, that is, a phenomenal consciousness.
– The Soul of James Turrell – – Alejandra de Argos –
