City of Light, 2019 121 x 213 cm 47 5/8 x 83 7/8 in © James Turrell Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Alessandro Wang
There’s no better time to see James Turrell’s work than now, when light is turning to gray and the days are getting darker. This Fall, the American artist has not one, but 2 exhibitions in Paris - Path Taken, at Almine Rech Matignon, and At One, one of his biggest shows ever, at Gagosian Le Bourget. But it’s not about size. Simply sitting quietly in front of his Tall Glass/Wide Glass at Almine Rech’s is a meditative experience - if one takes the time to sit and observe - which is difficult to describe. In these works, the light, which seems to be coming at you from inside the wall, slowly changes color over several hours. The light is speaking directly to you. It is a simple set up, but one of art’s most powerful - and mysterious - experiences, equal to looking at a Hieronymus Bosch painting, at Basquiat, Richter, or at a Brancusi sculpture.
City of Light, 2019 121 x 213 cm 47 5/8 x 83 7/8 in © James Turrell Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Photo: Alessandro Wang
Artists work on canvas, blocks of marble or metal, photography, make installations. Turrell’s material, over the past 60 years, has been light. Through light, Turrell challenges our perception of space and of seeing. “My work has no object, no image and no focus,” he says. “With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”
In the notes for his Gagosian show at Le Bourget - At One -, Turrell says: “I want to make something that people turn their attention towards. It’s not that different from when I was a child in the crib, fascinated by the light I saw above my crib.”
All Clear (2024). James Turrell. Photo: Thomas Lannes. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943 in a Quaker family, which has had a profound influence on his aesthetic. Quakers are known for the beauty and simplicity of their surroundings and designs. He studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College, in California. It has played a very important role in his work with our perception of light. He also studied astronomy, mathematics and geology. And he is an airplane pilot with over 12,000 hours of flying. Turrell got his license as a teenager, at 16. For him, being in the sky is like being in an immense canvas.
James Turrell’s show at Gagosian Le Bourget, is his largest in Europe in the past 25 years. It features 35 works among which a sublime All Clear, one of his Ganzfelds. It is inspired by the Ganzfeld effect in which one loses one’s sense of perception. The brain is amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals. In Turrell’s Ganzfeld, you enter a space bathed in soft lights generated by a LED screen and backlighting, changing over time, which make you lose any sense of the space. This disorientation, this feeling of being overwhelmed by light is what cathedral builders were looking for. One does not have to be religious or even spiritual to feel the impact of Turrell’s light. It is like we’re stepping into a painting.
Either, Or (2024) from the series Wedgework. Light installations and mixed media. James Turrell. Photo: Thomas Lannes. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
His other monumental piece is Either Or, from the series Wedgework. Projected light interacting with reflective surfaces seems to be expanding the room’s interior architecture. It’s a very different feeling, but no less mesmerizing. It takes hold of you. To reach Either Or, one has to enter into total darkness and follow the wall, hoping the eyes will slowly get accustomed to darkness. It is a very disorienting feeling, but it makes the experience of sitting in front of the piece even stronger emotionally.
In rooms on the ground floor and upstairs are Glasswork pieces as well as spectacular aquatints and woodcuts related to Turrell’s monumental project, Roden Crater.
The project, which has been ongoing for the past 40 years and is not yet completed, could very well be the artwork that will define 21st Century art, like nearby Walter DiMaria’s Lightning Field has defined 20th Century art. In 1979, flying over Northern Arizona’s Painted Desert, Turrell spotted this 400,000 year old crater. Since then, he has been moving millions of tons of earth to transform the crater into an observatory for the contemplation of the light and space of the sky at different times of the day or, even, over several years, like a giant Skyspace.
Rainbow over Roden Crater. Photo Florian Holzherr. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Even though there is no Skyspace in the Gagosian exhibition, as one walks around the gallery space and looks at the light installations and at the Roden Crater projects, one cannot help but think about how Turrell’s Skyspaces encapsulate everything about the artist: the physical quality of light, the immersion in the sky, the simplicity of Quaker aesthetics, the deeply emotional and even physical impact of the experience, the feeling of being at one with the universe and at the same time touching its deep mystery. Sitting at the end of the day in the PS1 Skyspace, Meeting, or in Open Sky, on the island of Naoshima, transports us to a land of enchantment. One is reminded of the extreme beauty of the Earth. “The idea of the meeting of the space inside to the space in the sky, and feeling that juncture, having it be a visceral, almost physical, feeling, as though there were material or something there,” explained Turrell in 2016, for his MoMA exhibition. “Because in my work, I often took light and gave it a feeling of thing-ness, of solidity.” And the magnificent Gagosian exhibition, as well as the smaller Almine Rech show, reminds us how singular and profound James Turrell’s work is.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
At One, 2024, installation view © James Turrell Photo: Thomas Lannes Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
James Turrell. Path Taken. Almine Rech Matignon. Until December 21, 2024. alminerech.com
James Turrell. At One. At Gagosian Le Bourget. Until Summer 2025. gagosian.com
