Ron Cooper: Lightworks
May 05 —
July 27, 2013
Featuring:
Ron Cooper is a few years younger than the light saber wielding Jedi warriors, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler and Robert Irwin. Irwin speaks about the distinction between the Fetishistic sculptures of Larry Bell or Peter Alexander as the “image” moving out of the “frame” by the Light and Space practitioners.
A transparent vertical bar laboriously tinted with lacquerous layers of acidic pigment floats from the support structure, casts its diluted shadow, a delicate wash on the wall; the luminescence seemingly intensified rather than muted by the veil of plexi.
Cooper treats the industrial fluorescent light fixture, each gelled in a pallet of brilliant hues, unleashing a melodious progression of color; the formal grace, accentuating its geometry with its pairing of simple panes of glass inserted at four inch intervals.
Two precisely focused beams of light cross each other in mid-flight, their impact conjures a cubic sculpture of light hovering in space.
The language of Minimalism is certainly at the forefront, but conceptual explorations of optical sleight of hand are particularly potent, fortified by the restraint he uses to achieve these effects with economy of means. He is much more aligned with The Museum of Jurassic Technology than the Imaginers at Disney. It is always the fragility of human gesture that unleashes the poetry; Technology’s clubfoot, the extinguisher of verse.
