Untill the demystification of light by Pascal and the discovery of its materiality refracted into color by a prism, light was essentially represented, and this more particularly in Quattrocento paintings, as a symbol of the divine transmitted by angel figures and halos of sanctity.
One of the first at the beginning of the XX century, Vladimir Tatline raises the question of structure and use of material, in an attempt to create the basis of a modern esthetic through the study of the intrinsic qualities of industrial material, lighting included. Later, a former seminarist, Dan Flavin, writes: “In itself, a light in a room could suggest an individual presence. But an electrical device that lightens both a room and an individual being in this room, looks more like a religious icon in the sense that the radiating light becomes the mean by which all visual information (knowledge) is revealed about the room and the individual in this room. In making the space and the visitor visible, the light, in a way, “creates” them. It is the source of all colors and apparent forms. It is a condition that creates their manifested existence, a supernatural presence that could be a direct metaphor of divinity: “I am the light of the world”. (artforum, April 1967)
Eleonora Meoni is born 1978, Via del Sole in Florence. Her father is a painter and she grew up a few hundred meters from the Uffizi before following courses at the Academia de Belli Arti. Therefore it is in its entire pictoriality that her light situations shall be approached, painting being one of the most efficient mean of evocation of natural events. Meoni use neon lights and filters like an artist could use canvas and colors: arctic white, aurora borealis green, deep purple, chrysalis pink. However if Meoni is not concerned with technological intention, her relationship with functionality is ambiguous. Her conception of lighting is conceived as an environemental project, revealing existing space, indicating conditions of life. In her solo exhibition, corporal immersion implies attitude.
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