SANTA FE, NM.- An exhibition, Illumination by David Simpson, opened at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art on October 5 and extends through November 3. The gallery is located in the Railyard Arts District at 554 South Guadalupe Street.

Pale pink stippled by an undertone of deep purple. A deep midnight blue that shimmers and pales into the color of coming dawn. The russet of fall leaves, edged in gold. The colors of the new selection of paintings by David Simpson featured in Illumination shift like moods. Depths of wine and opal and ice blue emerge and fade. These paintings become not just windows or doors – but rooms, spaces, shifting worlds. But while the colors entrance and bind the viewer with their spell – it is light, more than color, that David Simpson celebrates and explores in his mono-pigment interference paintings.

Light is a wave. Light is a particle. Light is a paradox. From the flame of a candle to the brilliance of the sun, light illumines our world and makes our universe knowable from across staggering distances. Light, to a physicist, is more than just the spectrum that we see – but the whole gamut of electromagnetic radiation from gamma rays to sound beyond what the human ear can hear – the music of the universe. Light is the spark responsible for all life on earth – from the synthesis of the molecules necessary for life, to the catalyst for energy conversion in photosynthesis. But long before light became the subject of physicists, it has fascinated humans with its power to illuminate – and perhaps none so much as artists.

Simpson traces his own fascination with light through the history of Western art from the Romanesque and Gothic eras, when light was shown to come from within its subjects. He notes that in Gothic cathedrals, a sculpture is set into a dark niche where it will seem to glow, “like a filament silhouetted by the dark.” It is no accident that during the Renaissance and the Baroque, when the human sciences began to explore light, artists began to favor chiaroscuro. The Impressionists took this exploration of light a step further, often making it a true focus of their work. Simpson has noted that in Monet’s famed series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral it is more the light itself that is the subject matter of the paintings, rather than the façade. And finally, in the 20th century, artists like Rothko and Flavin foregrounded light and color, to the exclusion of other subject matter.

Simpson’s interference paintings, which use a special paint containing microscopic particles coated with mica, are a truly unique exploration of light. Simpson has spent years mastering the pigments to achieve something no other painter has done with these colors. The mica particles, creating a matrix within the paint, trap and reflect light within the painting so that these works shift, often dramatically, across a spectrum of colors. From a pale pink to a deep blue, from warm copper to spring green, from deep rust to purple-toned gold. The changes occur based on the angle of the viewer and the angle of the light – but even more remarkably – due to the kind and quality of light.

Spend time with a painting by David Simpson and you begin to see the dynamism of its response to light. Sunlight, storm light, winter or summer, low light, sunset – these changes affect Simpson’s work, eliciting nuance and shades that can’t be appreciated with only a cursory look. Most remarkable of all, in certain lights, Simpson’s paintings, like the pages of an ancient illuminated manuscript, appear to glow, alive with a light all their own.

Illumination offers viewers an opportunity to experience this alchemy of light for themselves.