Light makes our world visible. It makes perception and experiences possible—and it produces in miraculous ways images and sensations whose permanence flickers between the warm, comforting glow of a light source and the space it illuminates. Light gives form to things even as it dissolves the fixed contours of the objective world into a shadowy realm, giving them a new and magical reality all their own. We are met with an aura, one whose projective potential finds its home in the interstitial region between sensory impressions and a dreamlike expansion of our feelings.

LINN LÜHN is especially pleased to present Twin Layers of Lightning. This exhibition, occurring over the course of the year’s dark months and across three gallery spaces, is devoted to the perception of light and the impact it can create. At the same time, it looks into the meaning contained in the mundane presence of lamps, light sources, and their effects.

Unlike in our usual, everyday encounters with light—indirect, as it were, and taken for granted—it is only when light is made to be detached from bodies and objects that it can be understood in its form as a central means of artistic representation. Here we encounter lamps, which, like constant silent companions, translate light’s spatializing and sight-giving functions into a palpably physical presence in our lives. They inscribe themselves in an almost visceral manner into the interiors of our rooms with their colored shades and abstract forms. Always with their invitation to linger, to pause in reflection on both the real thoughts and imaginary messages or tales contained in a day. As objects that bring with them their own warm, subtle “visual noise,” their own eigenlicht, the illumined spaces they create can come to operate almost like rooms unto themselves, rooms whose intimate quality—characterized by the dialogue between light bulbs, candles, and lanterns—stands in contrast to the radiance of artificial luminescence. They act as echoes, offering only shimmering hints of their industrial origin, of their form and function, dematerializing their own associations with the architectural or the sculptural. Alluring and hypnotic, they stand before us with an air of celestial immateriality. These enigmatic totems, whose ever-brighter flaring can reveal the presence of an absence, or the absence of a presence, seem to determine the very rhythm of our lives. Their light reveals the visibility of a space itself, floating lanterns inviting us to a luminous reality where things are seen anew.

Philipp Fernandes do Brito