François Morellet

Néons dans l'éspace, 1969

A continuous motiv in the work of François Morellet can be seen in his efforts to create experimental, sometimes paradoxical seeing situations in a geometrically precise way: “I love to see an apparently inexorable system running in the knowledge that another system or some interruption will get in the way, and thus enliven it.” Morellet was stimulated by kinetic experiments in the context of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel in Paris in the 1950s. He designed his first object using neon tubes in 1963, lighting up in overlapping rhythms. Néons dans l’espace makes viewers aware of the permanent temporariness of their constantly changing projections in relation to a constellation that the eye cannot grasp synchronously in its variability and complexity. A fleeting quality, the cancellation of fixed form, is made to seem permanent here by pushing the eye to the limits of its performance.