METZ.- For Borrowed Light Through METZ, Cerith Wyn Evans presents his first solo exhibition in a French institution since his 2006 show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (ARC). Transforming the Forum and Gallery 3, he brings together light and sound works to occasion mises-en-scene of radiant visual and aural effects. Like characters in a repertory theater, older works return and interact with recent works to generate new scenarios. Each work remains singular yet the artist places them in concert in such a way that the exhibition constantly mutates as if animated by an inner life.

Beginning his career in the 1970’s as an experimental filmmaker, Cerith Wyn Evans has maintained his correspondence with conceptual art in his sculptures and installations. His works retain the cinematic qualities of his earlier career; however, the viewers are no longer merely passive observers- their bodily presence and changing perspectives play a central role. For over forty years, the artist has developed a unique practice through which he explores the limits of perception, and, in the process, calls into question the conventions of exhibition-making.

In the Forum of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a “winter garden” presents works that, among other themes, blurs the boundaries between nature and culture. At the same time, the garden plays otf Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines’s architecture that folds the outside inside and the inside out. For this installation, the artist fills the space with plants that bathe in natural sunlight coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. This light changes throughout the day and with the seasons. Amidst the plants, two columns made from tubes of filament light bulbs, recall the paper tubes for which Shigeru Ban, has become famous. Like enormously tall glass trees, they stretch up to the 35-meter-high ceiling. The columns on this occasion will not consciously transmit light. They are a silent sign, evoking the inevitable progress of technology. A hanging glass human skeleton made specifically for the space casts shadows on the wall behind it. Also in the Forum, large amethyst geodes set in glass crates act as guides to the dialogue between the natural and the social.

In an atmosphere significantly ditferent from that of the winter garden, the third-floor gallery becomes what Wyn Evans calls a “stroll garden”. Here, contrary to traditional hangings, the artist “sows” his works like plants. Moreover, in this space, he has realized a long- held desire to line gallery walls with mirrors. As he states, “It was a dream I doubted would ever come true!”. Producing a striking spectacle, he covers the 80-meter- long walls with mirrors. The light emanating from the sculptures create electrifying etfects as they bounce otf the mirrors in perpetual movement, ‘oscillating back and forth, recto/verso/recto ad infinitum’. Wyn Evans uncovers the large windows at either end of the gallery so that the outside light and views of Metz become active elements in the exhibit. Staging the works in this unparalleled setting, he intensifies the haptic experience of the space through the optical etfects of infinitely multiplying the view. In this way, he extends the horizon of the exhibit to include a panorama of Metz as a borrowed landscape which becomes a backdrop to our ‘interior garden’.

The luminous and sonorous works appear to express a vital force. For example, five columns made of LED bulbs slowly light up to a blinding full intensity and fade otf to total transparency at a pace that gives the impression they are calmly breathing. This work echoes the nearby transparent glass sculpture with crystal flutes that inhale and exhale the surrounding air according to a programmed algorithmic design. The flutes perform on their own, emitting eerie drone-like sounds. While playing the flute or making hand-blown glass usually requires human breath, here the human body has disappeared, and the artwork has found its own voice. Suspended abstract neon drawings in light based on traditional Japanese Noh theater seem to perform a frenetic dance.

As the artist has described it, this ‘highly photogenic’ show reflects the narcissism and voyeurism of the image economy. It counters how we use pictures produced, consumed, and distributed with smartphones or what the artist calls, ‘these ubiquitous tyrannical devices regulated by algorithms designed to service our pictorial desires’. Wyn Evans has created an installation wherein snapshots can never capture the sensations and intensities that directly atfect the bodies of those visiting the show. The exhibit as a whole reverberates in reflections, and flickering lights that bleed into each other. Thereupon, the visitors become actors in a choreography of natural and artificial light, shadows, sound, and silence. With the ditfusion of the light and sonic waves along with the ever-changing positions of the spectators, each moment of viewing becomes a new event.