An Riveting Conversation with Adrien Lucca
Photo Credit: Leslie Artamonow
Adrien Lucca (France, 1983) studied visual arts at the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels, where he experimented with various media, including drawing on paper. There followed an intense period of research and study of the theories of color scientists and theorists such as Isaac Newton, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ogden Rood, Georges Roque, Françoise Viénot, and Mark D. Fairchild for their recent research in the field of color.
Adrien Lucca’s interest in optical mixing led him to produce scientific drawings, which he called Études. In 2010 and 2011, he continued his research at the Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, and in 2014, he learned computer coding to create more complex drawings. Entirely handmade, he generated his drawings using algorithms that he designed himself.
In 2023 and 2019, he received a grant from the European Commission and the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research to develop white light synthesizers and integrate the use of artificial light into his work. His experience with glass began in 2015 when he entered a competition organized by Bruxelles Mobilité, for which he created a set of fourteen backlit stained-glass windows for the Place d’Armes metro station in Montreal. Since then, glass has become one of his favorite materials.
Adrien Lucca has been teaching at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in Brussels. He is currently continuing his research on the complex relationship between color and light. In 2023, Lucca held his first monographic exhibition in a contemporary art museum at the BPS22 in Charleroi, Belgium. Since 2015, he has produced monumental works in Belgium, Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands. Another monumental glasswork will soon be installed in Toulouse, France.
He has exhibited internationally in art spaces and art galleries such as the WhiteHouse Gallery, LMNO, La Centrale for Contemporary Art, Elaine Levy Project, and elsewhere.
I had the pleasure of asking him about what led him to work with a focus on color and LED lights, how he challenges the everyday perception of color and uses it in his work, and so much more.
UZOMAH: How do you develop the type of Lighting you want via a fleet of digital fabrication machines before being outsourced for production?
ADRIEN: Outsourcing is usually very expensive and complex. In fact, I handle most of the production in-house. Apart from certain components like electronics or metals, everything—from design to assembly and calibration—is done within my studio. I am developing light-emitting objects from scratch, using the most basic components (LEDs, electronic components, fluorescent powders, etc.) Most importantly, all the objects that come out of this process are finely tuned using scientific instruments and methods which are basically the same methods used in the lighting industry. I have my own lab and workshop, and I code my own software as well. Outsourcing is usually expensive and complex.
Installation views: “calor COLOR,” Galería de arte Marlborough Madrid, Spain, 2023, courtesy of Galería de arte Marlborough Photo Credit: Roberto Ruiz
U: When developing a large-scale public space project, how do you gauge both the natural light of the day and the night light to bring out the actual colors in the art?
A: Each project requires a unique approach. For example, in projects involving windows, I often rely solely on natural light. In this case, I check if the natural light has already been considered by the architects (even centuries ago), and I’m working with it. When I visit a building, I bring a spectrophotometer to assess the light quality and intensity. If possible, I stay for an entire day to observe the way the light interacts with the architecture. I also use light-tracking simulation software.
In other cases, I will develop a custom artificial light system that takes over the role of daylight at night, leading me to alter the colors that I use. Each project being different, I can only give examples. In a work from 2018 called Microcosmos and another one from 2023 called Voûte céleste, both in Belgium, I used light systems that transform the colors of the pigments with which I painted a geometric works, on large surfaces outdoors. The artworks are very different during the day and the night. In Voûte céleste, the colors are slowly pulsating, appearing, and disappearing. Depending on the light, some red pigments become red-on-grey or grey-on-grey and, therefore, visible or invisible.
U: How do you use color to bring viewers closer to the physical world that they revolve daily in your pieces?
A: Color is not a physical phenomenon, but a mental one. Color is “triggered” by the interaction of matter (pigments), light, the retina and the brain, it is not only a physical bunch of wavelengths. The same light with the same physical composition can have different colors in different contexts. Also, physically different lights (with different wavelengths) can have the same color. These facts are not easy to explain but are easy to demonstrate. To reveal such counter-intuitive aspects of color was the aim of some of my works, like Yellow zone/yellow-free zone (2018). When someone enters a room where objects suddenly change without any perceivable reason, (in this case, large yellow spheres become red), one immediately understands that the relationship between color and physical causes is strange, and that our visual sense is deceiving. Instead of saying that I bring viewers closer to the physical world, I bring them closer to the limits of human perception, I raise awareness about these limits.
LAMPE CIEL (VERSION 1.2) 2019 31645 ALUMINIO, LED, DIFUSOR PMMA, FÓSFORO, CABLE, TRANSFORMADOR 302 x 10 x 6 cm Photo Credit: Roberto Ruiz.
U: What led you to work with a focus on color and LED lights?
A: Long story short: I wanted to become a music composer a while ago, in the 2000s, but I gave this idea up and instead tried to translate the logic of musical composition into visual compositions. That led me to experiment with color and to notice that I wasn’t understanding well how color works and how light and colored materials interact. That made me curious, so I spent the next 10+ years studying color, pigments, light, technology, color science, and theories from the past and the present. LED light is the latest of light technologies available and it allows artists to work directly with the spectrum of light in a precise way. It was, therefore, natural to use and study it in my work. It happened progressively—first, paints' pigments and color, then glass and LEDs in various projects.
U: How do you use light to bring out the color when creating a stained glass piece?
A: A stained-glass window is bidimensional, but it makes a multi-dimensional installation. There is what you see when you look at the window, there is the projection of the window in the space, and there’s the way the window illuminates the whole space. All these parameters are important, and they change over time according to the weather. When a piece of glass is transparent (colored or not), its perceived color depends on what’s just behind it (the sky, a tree, etc.) When the glass is translucent and smokey, the color depends on the light that falls on it from every direction: the sun, the sky, and the surroundings. I play with these properties to create contrasts and colors that change when the light conditions change. For example, the work Entrelacs quasi-cristallins (2016) can look colorful and soft in the shadow, while it looks black and white under sunlight. In these conditions, it also projects in the space a complex and colorful pattern, and illuminates the room with a soft white light.
ENTRELACS QUASI-CRISTALLINS 2016 31653 VIDRIERA, CRISTAL ANTIGUO, PLOMO Y GRISALLA 192 x 60 x 5 cm Photo Credit: Roberto Ruiz.
U: How can learning more in math and science make one a better visual artist? How has it made you?
A: I’ll only speak about myself if you don’t mind. Considering that my project was to use color in a way akin to composing music, math and science were mandatory. I grew up with a computer and software that allowed the easy and precise control of sound frequencies and rhythms. These tools shaped my sensibility and my way of thinking and doing things. I needed the same kind of tools for color, but they didn’t exist, so I had to figure out how to create them. I would not have accepted to work with approximations while I knew it was possible to work with precision. The study of color science was the way to do it. This study opened up lots of possibilities of forms and new ideas. My father was a skilled craftsman, and my taste for traditional techniques and maybe geometry as well comes from the environment I grew up in. I’m happy that I could also reexplore traditional media such as painting or stained-glass with a renewed methodology.
U: How do you challenge and use the everyday perception of color in your work?
A: I like to set up situations where viewers experience something that will surprise them or tell them that what they think they know is not always true. Color seems to be a natural property of the things that we are looking at. When it does not appear as it normally does in a familiar context, it raises deep questions about the way we interpret the world: what do we see? How big and important is what we don’t see? What do other species see? What kind of perceptions are we missing, and would we change our behavior if we would see more? I’m trying to use light and color to make this kind of question occur in the viewers’ minds. Recently, I’m trying to work with flowers and light to show colors and structures that are normally invisible to human beings but are visible to bees, moths, or birds – parallel worlds or parallel visual realities that exist within the world around us.
WAVE PATTERNS #5, #6, #11, #9, #4 2016 31651 PIGMENTO Y LÁPIZ SOBRE PAPEL 50.5 x 46.8 cm 51 x 55 cm (total con marco) Photo Credit: Roberto Ruiz.
