Installation view

The Suzy Shammah gallery is presenting the first Italian exhibition by the American artist Spencer Finch (New Haven, 1962). For his show, the artist created – specifically for the gallery space – a lighting installation, which recreates his perception of the light in his New York studio at noon last August 17th. The experience is repeated three times in the three rooms of the gallery, therefore producing the paradox of ubiquity, as in some miracles of renaissance painting. Six light panels, equal in size but different in intensity and configuration, are means by which he qualitatively reproduces the atmosphere of that place. Each element of the installation is connected to a precise moment in time and to a visual observation point. The contraposition of the panels in the gallery area puts the different visual qualities of that moment into play, thus creating the experience of a suspended time.

Starting from an individual experience, Spencer Finch's work evokes special views of places that are often deep-rooted in the collective imagination. His attention to colour and light in particular, has led him to explore the relationship between perception and language in many ways. His attempt to recreate a subjective experience deliberately clashes with the impossibility of objectively transferring a totally partial event. As in Simone Weil statement "how beautiful it is to see a landscape when I am not there" memory plays a key role. It is among the things we see and remember that the particular definition of the colours sediments and the physical experience is suggested, with the probability of not occurring.

Sunlight in an Empty Room; August 17, 2006, 12:07 p.m.; East Wall / West Wall; Version II, 2006
fluorescent fixtures, lamps with filters
120 x 120 cm each