The Brooklyn Rail

Pulling open the black curtain, the viewer encounters Olafur Eliasson’s magical phantasmagoria, Your psychoacoustic light ensemble (2024), a sound and projection piece with laterally moving globes of light that transverses cosmic, scientific, and psychological dimensions. To fully understand the work’s genius would require a ghostly quorum of alchemists, physicists, mystics, and pioneers of optics and prisms. This sympathetic phantom audience of antecessors might include Athanasius Kircher the Baroque polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Isaac Newton, and founder of psychophysics Gustav Theodor Fechner. This piece traverses the timeline in both directions, and hopefully a modern viewer can grasp the work’s historical significance along with the contemporary technical innovation and wizardry. Between three and eight globes of light with a dark pupil-like dot move laterally, resembling transparent eyeballs. Eyes, especially when illuminated, can symbolize the Eye of God, and it is hard not to think of Odilon Redon’s many versions of this theme. Eliasson’s globes resemble the eyeball scans one sees at the optometrist, complete with dark pupils. Audio waves stimulate and determine the visual phenomena, causing the light spheres to fade and ripples to appear on their surfaces. Viewers visualize what they are hearing. Fechner, in his essay “Comparative Anatomy of Angels” (1825), offers perhaps the most poetic commentary on this Eliasson masterwork:

Thus we may view our own eye as a creature of the sun
on earth, a creature dwelling in and nourished by the
sun’s rays, and hence a creature structurally resembling its
brothers on the sun … But the sun’s creatures, the higher
beings I call angels, are eyes which have become autonomous,
eyes of the highest inner development which retain never-
the-less, the structure of the ideal eye. Light is their element
as ours is air.

In 1646, Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit polymath, published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, a study of lenses and projection resembling a magic lantern. Your psychoacoustic light ensemble uses a projection system of lens-like discs that act as mirrors and reflect the image from canisters positioned near the floor. There is a sympathetic magic present here; Eliasson’s globes feel alive as they respond to sound waves. This is a deeply symbolic work where the lens-shaped discs used to project the globes feel in correspondence with the lenses of viewers’ own eyes, as if their inner eye structure and psychic interiority are projected outward. This inner/outer correspondence makes the work resonate deeply. The artist has produced one of his most important works in a decade, which feels like an important innovation and new chapter in an existing dialogue.

In a second curtained-off dark space is Eliasson’s Your rainbow horizon (2024), an intense spectrum band projected horizontally across the end wall. The LED light used to create the spectrum produces intense color which feels artificial and differs from spectrums produced in nature, like rainbows. The intensity of the color spectrum here is in direct contrast to the subtle spectrums in the large-scale watercolors seen in the next gallery. It is hard not to long for the physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton’s 1660s series of experiments with natural sunlight and prisms, which divided sunlight into seven basic colors.

Eliasson has long been involved with investigations of color phenomena, which extends here to his installations, sculptures, and watercolors. The artist writes that color “does not exist in itself but only when looked at. The unique fact that color only materializes when light bounces off a surface onto our retinas shows us that the analysis of colors is, in fact, about the ability to analyze ourselves.” Discussions of the nature of color began with Plato, who stated that black and white were the source of all color. Eliasson moves closer to Newton, who believed that both color and sound are subjective experiences relayed through the senses and experienced as airwaves in the case of sound and electromagnetic radiation in the case of color and light. It is hard not to think of the scientist and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s work with prisms, from which he developed his color theory, when viewing Eliasson’s Your rainbow horizon and the six large watercolors in the third gallery. Goethe’s Theory of Colours [Zur Farbenlehre] was published in German in 1810. Rudolf Steiner, and members of the Bauhaus like Johannes Itten, based much of their color theory on Goethe. Hilma af Klint spent an extended period of time at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, studying Steiner’s translations of Goethe’s color theory.

Here, Eliasson expands the discussion with six sublime watercolors: Diffused watercolour rainbow, Ephemeral watercolour rainbow, Dissolved watercolour rainbow, Watercolour rainbow (soon), Ethereal watercolour rainbow, and Watercolour rainbow (to come) (all 2024). These technically masterful watercolors feel like prisms dispersed through mist. No brush strokes are present, and we wonder if fairies have crafted them using projected light waves and dew.

Fierce tenderness sphere (2024) is a work that requires low light, and here we are not able to see the piece’s kaleidoscopic tricks. The viewer longs for a darkened space like Otto Piene’s Salon de Lumière (1962–98). The design and fabrication give Eliasson’s piece a scientific precision and coldness that made this reviewer long for Piene’s rougher, hand-crafted feel. Yet Fierce tenderness sphere is part of a longer, important tradition of the artist’s kaleidoscopic light works, such as Your spiral view (2002) (a long tunnel of mirrors, stainless steel and glass) and Well for Villa Medici (1998) (a well shaft containing hexagonal mirrors). It needs to be considered as part of Eliasson’s whole oeuvre and seen in more ideal circumstances. Your psychoacoustic light ensemble remains the poetic gem of this exhibition, and a masterpiece by an artist of substance. This is an exhibition not to be missed and is a highlight of the season.