Adrien Lucca deals with the demon of light, as he sometimes puts it. More specifically, how the spectrum of light affects our colour vision. LEDs and pigments are as much a part of his uni- verse as the fluorescent flower marks that are visible to the bees but invisible to the human eye. Lucca’s work is permeated by a multitude of intersections, between colour and light, both nat- ural and artificial, but also between art, design and scientific research. Sometimes, he plays with the audience using magic tricks, rousing the spectator into incredulity: what if I can perceive the world in a non-human way?
ES (Elena Sorokina) Can we say that colour is a human fiction?
AL (Adrien Lucca) It’s not easy to define what colour is. Many di!erent definitions exist, depending on whether you talk to a neuroscientist, physicist, artist, and so on. These definitions are often dissatisfying, and I have this utopian idea that as artists we should try to create something for everyone, to talk to the life on this planet, if you will. The coherence of colours in our daily experience is caused by invisible and largely unconscious mechanisms. Imagine a demon who controls the non-visible parameters behind colour vision: he could play with a keyboard of light e!ects to do magic tricks, possibly beautiful, pleasing and surprising — similar to the e!ects of certain drugs. Tricks that touch the very foundations of our visual universe: what if I can sense the world in a completely di!erent manner?
ES In terms of the history of colour, how do you situate your work within that? Light has played an important role in our thinking about colour since we first started developing theories about what ‘colour’ is.
AL Ideas about the relationship between light and colour have changed profoundly over centuries. Aristotle’s teachings described colours as mixtures of light and shadow: intrinsically dark colours (blue, violet, black) were composed of less light and more shadow, and vice-versa for the lighter colours (orange, yel- low, white). Isaac Newton revealed new relationships between light, matter and colour still form the foundations of colour sci-ence today. I see myself as a child of this history.
ES You are interested in both natural and artificial light. Do you have a sort of ‘colour archive’ in your studio that also includes light samples?
AL Yes. I taught myself colour and light while experimenting first-hand with pigments and glass, and also with LEDs. I am a collector of coloured materials: I have bought entire cata- logues of pigments and LED lights of di!erent provenances, and I’ve looked at lots of real, non-artificial colours and lights in the process.
ES If we speak about light art and the traditions going back to the 1960s, with Robert Irwin and James Turell, among oth- ers, do you have any connections, references or interest in their practices?
AL I have been more interested in studying the work of minor art history figures such as André and Monique Lemonnier, Narciso Slivestrini and other artists that made a living in the twentieth century by working as teachers or advisors for industrial colour companies.
ES You are interested in both human and non-human vision. In terms of the latter, insects are a fascinating example: many have compound eyes with a much wider field of view, and some insects can even perceive ultraviolet light. The project you recently developed for Gluon (the resi- dency and educational platform in Brussels promoting partnerships between scientists, artists and research in- stitutions, ed.) in the framework of S+T+ARTS begins right here. Where did your interest in the non-human percep- tion of colour come from?
AL I was frustrated by the poverty of the conceptual frame- work around colour, especially in art education. Painted colour on a canvas is something specific which has almost nothing to do with the experience of colour ‘in general’. Colour includes the colour on a canvas, of course, but it is also many other intriguing things. For example, the names for colours only make sense if you share the same language and vision as the person who pro- nounces them. Cultural di!erences tune visual systems to see di!erently somehow. The Japanese word 青い (aoi) covers the territories of the English words for both blue and green, while the Russian words !”#$%”& (goluboy) and ‘()(& (siniy) would both be translated as ‘blue’ in English, and each word comes with its own precise constellation of visual perceptions and associated meanings. How would you reconcile such facts with the idea that colour is a universal experience?
ES Maybe we should explain Parallel Worlds, your project that deals with the night vision of an insect we all know, the one living in cities alongside us humans — the moth.
AL The starting point for the project was the relationship be- tween the colour of flowers and the vision of the insects that have a relationship with the flowers. Insects don’t see the same
colours as humans, they live in a world of colours invisible to us.
ES And the same is true for humans as well — we live in a world of colours invisible or only partially visible to non-hu- mans: we see part of what they see, but not everything.
AL If I were a bee and an artist, what would I do? I would col- lect flowers and I would have my garden of colours that I would take care of. Flowers and the insects co-evolved together. We could almost say that the colours of flowers are ‘synthetic’, because they were synthesised by insects through their selection of flower characteristics. Why flowers have this or that specific colour is mostly due to insects, and has nothing to do with us.
ES Yet it’s something we don’t accept so easily, because our occidental culture is human-centric, and we see it all through the human eye, which is a rather strange idea actually… There are millions of di!erent ‘visions’ and ‘worldviews’ — some infrared, others with kaleidoscopic optics. So, where is the colour? Is colour, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?
AL I’ve been exploring the limits of human colour percep- tion. You saw in my studio that I can change the colours of things in a way that forces you to abandon the idea that colour is ‘in’ an object or is a property of that object. Colour exists in the relationship between light, the eye, the brain and the object. An object might be red for me, but black for a bee. Colour is real, but it does not inhere in objects.
ES This impossible translation seems to be at the heart of your attempts to grasp non-human vision through the hu- man faculties of art (and science). On the one hand, you understand human limits — we can’t see what the insect sees — but you can model an approximation, look for pos- sible overlaps and di!erences. Can a bee have a ‘point of view’, for example, since its vision is kaleidoscopic?
AL A bee may have something like a ‘field of view’ maybe?
ES Exactly. How might an insect navigate another species’ world, where everything is designed for a di!erent type of perception? In your work, you often set up these funny and troubling experiments for humans, in which colours mirac- ulously appear or disappear under specific kinds of lights.
AL In a context where colour is discussed in essentialist ways, as something naturally occurring in objects, as if it were created for us, I decided to demonstrate the opposite: literally, by producing inexplicable colour changes with my light- based tools. If a red object can turn into a green one, spectators realise that they have serious work to do in adapting their understanding of what colour is.
ES The language of colour and light, how to describe and name colours in relationship to light, has been one of the main concerns of art history. Given your enormous archive of light colours, do you also have a kind of dictionary for them? My own vocabulary, I am afraid, would be rather limited, covering some cardinal directions only — warm or cold, bright or dim, steady or flickering.
AL I actually had the idea of inventing new names for colours. For example, two yellow pigments might look the same, but if you change the light, one turns beige and the other bright red. So, I started thinking about naming colours according to possible conditions. The name of the colour would once again be linked to its material, because the material has unique qualities.
ES Let’s finish with your current work in progress, produced with Gluon in the context of your project ‘How to look at looking?’ Can you explain the idea behind it?
AL The industrial design of artificial lights is human-centric, and it surely disturbs non-human eyes. While this light looks natural to us, it is too ‘coloured’ for insects who live at night, it shifts the field of colours they see. LEDs are considered better for the environment because they are more energy efficient and produce less toxic waste, but their light is disturbing for insects. By solving one problem, we’ve created another one.
This text was written by Elena Sorokina and published in GLEAN 6 winter 2024 see here
