With this exhibition, 836M leveraged its position as a space known for showcasing local and international artists, focusing on those who build bridges between Paris and San Francisco. La Lumière Parle (in English, The Light Speaks), the first-ever solo exhibition in San Francisco of French artist Eric Michel, featured almost thirty works, including twenty-two photographs explicitly produced for the show, a mural, four light sculptures/installations, and videos.
La Lumière Parle was also 836M’s first exhibit dedicated to light and space. This show produced what Eric Michel calls a “total work,” one that includes light, colors, and sound in dialogue with both the gallery and surrounding office/workspace—creating a sense of harmony through various media: fluorescent sculpture, photography, painting, video and colored films tinting natural and artificial light throughout the day. He transformed the gallery environment, redirecting available light from skylights, windows, and other light sources onto walls and other surfaces.
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THE BOATMAN
I am in love with light.
It is the most favored medium of my sensitivity, of my work.
It flows in our lives, it irrigates our universe.
It opens the door.
Light has this unique feature, to be both corpuscular and undulatory in nature, both material and immaterial.
And for me, the artist shall be a boatman, precisely from the material toward the immaterial, from the real toward the imaginary, toward pure sensitivity.
What a better vector than light to achieve this goal?
Light as medium then, but why not as a finality?
Did I really choose light? Didn’t it impose itself upon me?
Light talks.
I hear it,
Sometimes.
Rome, 2007