The binary language and parameters of art

Exhibition If Then Else explores how art speaks to audiences

https://www.luxtimes.lu/culture/the-binary-language-and-parameters-of-art/1321425.html

Michael Reinertz is the Luxembourg Times' culture critic Photo: Guy Wolff
06/12/2019

A new exhibition at contemporary art venue Casino Luxembourg explores the visual language of art and how it speaks to viewers, using minimalist techniques that reveal more depth at second glance.

Created by the Brussels based collective LAb[au]—Manuel Abendroth, Jérôme Decock and Els Vermand—the exhibition, If Then Else, uses letters and numbers but also colours, shapes and patterns to take a linguistic approach to the field of art.

At first glance very bare and minimal—with simple shapes and colours fluttering almost imperceptibly across the museum walls—the exhibition takes on new depth once the viewer comes to understand LAb[au]’s conceptual approach to their work.

As architects as well as artists, the members of the collective bring their knowledge of engineering, mathematics and programming to probe the parameters of art.

One focus in the exhibition is the artistic tradition of monochrome, a highly conceptual art form--popularized by 20th century abstract artists, such as Anish Kapoor, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Robert Rauschenberg and Yves Klein--which uses only a single colour pigment.

The exhibition's centrepiece is a square of yellow pigment Photo: Eric Chenal / Casino Luxembourg

In their exhibition, LAb[au] present their own monochromes; however, they deviate heavily from standard tradition.

The centrepiece of the exhibition, One Thousand Six Hundred Light Years, is a large square of yellow pigment sitting on an elevated platform. Pointed directly at the square is a Geiger counter whose amplified clicking records the material decay of the yellow pigment as it emits energy into space, marking the work’s slow but steady transition between states.

Instead of taking colour as an isolated, pure phenomenon, LAb[au]’s monochromes explore colour as a parameter of visual language defined through its diametric opposition across states of time and space.

Another piece, U-238 > Pb-206, shows a picture in which the top half is made up of lead, while the bottom is comprised of fluorescent, yellow uranium. While neither colour nor material match up in the painting’s current state, eventually uranium decays and turns into lead. In this way, U-238 > Pb-206 presents itself as a monochrome stretched across time.

In both these works, LAb[au] proves that monochrome can never exist as a singular state, neither in its material make up nor artistic conception. Artists such as Yves Klein used monochrome as an expression of universal oneness, while others such as Pierre Manzoni used monochrome to explore the idea of ‘nothingness’. Instead, LAb[au] shows monochrome as part of a binary, a parameter which defines the visual language of art through the opposition of natural states.

In the end, LAb[au] sees this opposition, these ones and zeros, oneness and nothingness, as defining art and its ability to communicate.

While this may seem like a stale and cold approach to the expressive breadth art, LAb[au] proves, in a rather optimistic way, that art is always speaking to us. Whether or not we can understand what it is saying, is another question--one which the visitors of the Casino will have to answer for themselves.

The exhibition continues until 5 January 2020.