LISBON.- Since the mid-1990s, the artistic practice of Cerith Wyn Evans has been notable for its exploration of the interplay between art, language, and technology. His most striking works are those in which light, sound, text, space, and movement are the driving factors in a creative approach that encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation, and video, challenging viewers’ perception and sensory experience. Wyn Evans’ work is characterised by extraordinary aesthetic refinement and technical precision. It also draws frequently on literary, philosophical, scientific, and artistic references, which the artist fruitfully transposes through quotations and by appropriating pre-existing elements (drawings, objects, musical compositions, sentences), reconfiguring them to open up new fields of aesthetic and poetic resonance.

This is Cerith Wyn Evans’s first solo exhibition in Portugal. Responding to the spatial conditions and architectural characteristics of both Galeria Oval and Galleria 1 at the MAAT Gallery, the 31 works on display – spanning from 1994 to 2025 – form a choreographic and synaesthetic whole that invites visitors to meander through them, encountering and juxtaposing modes of seeing, listening, feeling, thinking, and drifting. Without any pre-established route, the exhibition allows visitors to wander freely. It thus creates a unique experience that encourages multiple perspectives and viewpoints from above and below, a play of vision and perceptual and sensory stimuli that gradually reveal themselves over time.

Cerith Wyn Evans (1958, Llanelli, Wales) is renowned for his diverse artistic practices, including sculpture, installation, photography, film, and text, and his unique approach to art, often exploring themes of language, perception, and temporality. After studying at Saint Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, Evans collaborated with Derek Jarman, a significant influence on his career. His early works employed film and video, but his use of neon lights and text-based works, which often incorporate literary references and philosophical texts, creating immersive and thought- provoking experiences for viewers, turned out to be the most recurring throughout his production.

In 2003, Cerith Wyn Evans represented Wales at the country’s inaugural pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale, where he also participated in 1995 and 2017. His artistic career is punctuated by the participation in major international exhibitions like the Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), and Istanbul Biennial (2005), Yokohama Triennale (2008), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), and the Liverpool Biennial (2021), and solo exhibitions at prominent institutions such as Tate Britain, London (2010), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2006), and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2014). More recent exhibitions include his solo show at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018), Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2019), Aspen Art Museum (2021), Sogetsu Kaikan, Japan (2023), Centre Pompidou-Metz (2024), and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2025).

Cerith Wyn Evans' works are held in several prestigious collections, including the Tate Collection, London; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Fondation Louis Vuitton; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

S=U=T=R=A

S=U=T=R=A (2017) consists of two Murano chandeliers that, though one is fractionally smaller than the other, appear identical. A long-established Venetian glassmaker designed this style of chandelier, crafting it in the 1970s for a mosque in Tehran. The bulbs illuminate in sync with a musical composition by Cerith Wyn Evans, translating sound into light. A minor variation in the scores’ duration introduces subtle asynchrony between the sound and light movements. The title references Indian spiritual traditions: sutra means “string” or “thread”, but it also denotes an aphorism, group of aphorisms, or an extended teaching in prose.

Forms in Space… by Light (in Time)

Forms in Space… by Light (in Time) (2017) is a monumental sculpture, the largest Cerith Wyn Evans has produced to date, composed of nearly two kilometres of neon tubes. Suspended from the ceiling, these tubes form an immense and complex multidimensional drawing: an entanglement of straight and curved lines, oscillating between abstraction and somewhat recognisable fragments. The work interweaves ideas and references central to Wyn Evans’s practice, such as the three-dimensional transpositions of The Oculist Witnesses, embedded by Marcel Duchamp in the lower section of The Large Glass (1915–1923), and the kata diagram- inspired drawings that schematise the precise, codified movements in Japanese Noh theatre, in which movement is radically stylised and pared back. Wyn Evans foregrounds the lyrical forms derived from the movement inherent notations, while transposing them into the spatial and physical domain.

The work lacks a defined front or sides: the visitor’s view is momentary, partial, and circumstantial. As the artist observed: “There are many layers to it and multiple points of entry. Very importantly, my viewpoint is not the only take on it. If anything, it’s a zone to meditation and a place for reverie on the transference of energy. I feel there’s an insufficiency of means to come to even a conventional description of what it is to live through a revolution in information technology and to look at the exchanges of energy that go across the surfaces of the earth, let alone what fantasies we might have about parallel realities. I want people to be in a place where they might be able to pick up on some of these things.” (Inteview with Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper, 31 March 2017).

Composition for Flutes

Composition for Flutes (2017) is a sound sculpture that incorporates a mechanical device. Drawing in air from its surroundings, the device channels it into eleven crystal flutes, according to a rhythm generated by a pre-programmed algorithm. As the air passes through the flutes, they produce a sound both soft and strange, straddling the line between harmony and dissonance. The work operates as an autonomous organism, born of the interdependence of air, material (glass), technical equipment, sound, and spatial environment.

StarStarStar/Steer

In StarStarStar/Steer (Transphoton) III and VI (2019), LED columns operate through a complex system of sequential lighting, transitioning from transparency when off to intense, blinding brightness when illuminated. The light is programmed to echo the cadence close to that of human breathing. As the brightness slowly fades, the columns change in appearance. Viewers can then see through them and notice their constituent materials. Their linearity and verticality evoke Doric columns, yet they are suspended cylinders, hovering just above the floor and below the ceiling.

Audio Column (incarnation Lisboa)

One of the subtle works in the exhibition, Audio Column (Incarnation Lisboa) (2025), consists of a circular directional loudspeaker on the floor that generates a vertical column of sound expanding into the space. The frequencies are audible only to those nearby and include fragments of recordings made by a radio telescope: sounds from planets, stars, and other astrophysical bodies from an extraterrestrial dimension.

Composition in Panes (on Reflection)

Composition in Panes (on Reflection) (2017) is a sculptural installation notable for its near transparency, aside from shifting reflections and refractions of light. It comprises a constellation of glass panels, each with a speaker emitting a panoply of sounds. These include a piano piece composed and performed by the artist, as well as sounds from space, namely fragments broadcast by a radio station with specialised equipment to transmit sounds captured by satellites orbiting the Earth.

Katagami Screens

In the Katagami Screens series (2015), Cerith Wyn Evans revisits the traditional Japanese stencils used for dyeing and printing patterns on fabric, namely for kimonos. The series reflects his enduring admiration for Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, employing the ancient technique of layering multiple thin washi sheets with a persimmon-based lacquer to produce a rigid, richly coloured paper. Popular patterns include a wide variety of motifs: stylised chrysanthemums, arabesques, and geometric forms. Mounted between glass sheets and slightly distanced from the wall, the works achieve a striking physical presence, allowing viewers to appreciate the interplay between patterns and the shadows cast by light filtering through the cut outs.

Neon after Stella

The series of white neon works, Neon after Stella (2022), draws inspiration from Frank Stella’s renowned series Black Paintings (1958–1960), a paradigm of a new abstraction in painting that emphasises geometry, repetition, monochrome, and the objective nature of painting. Cerith Wyn Evans interprets Stella’s canvases in neon, transcribing them into a different material and visual reality. The faint white lines of the paintings are translated into the bold strips of the light tubes. with the dominant pictorial black elided, becoming a void, a transparent interstice. This approach affirms the negative of the Black Paintings. Suspended and spaced apart, the glowing rectangles encourage viewers to walk among them, observing them from various perspectives. Collectively, the pieces evoke a palimpsest, creating moiré effects from certain angles due to their overlapping shimmering lines.

Sounding Felix (incarnation maat)

Sounding Felix (Paris 8 assemblage) (2022) was conceived for an international symposium honouring the psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari, held at the University of Paris 8 in 2022. Cerith Wyn Evans’ sound installation combines multiple elements – a gong, a transducer, a telephone, lamps, and a stack of Philippe Starck plastic chairs –, some draped with semi-transparent aluminium mylar blankets. A confessed admirer of both Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Wyn Evans includes an excerpt from a 1975 lecture in which Guattari openly challenges Deleuze.

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI

The Latin phrase In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni – often translated as “we wander at night and are consumed by fire” – lends its name to this 2008 work. It is a palindrome, reading the same from left to right and right to left, generating an endless, circular rhythm. Cerith Wyn Evans transposes this phrase into a luminous object whose form underscores its intrinsic circularity. The title also references Guy Debord’s 1978 film of the same name. Through this work, Wyn Evans metaphorically reanimates the critical, combative vision of a radical thinker, writer and filmmaker who, to the end, rejected the lifestyle and expectations of consumer society.