Leo VillarealDigital Campfire

lightbox with lanscape orientation and color gradation with light purple on top dark purple in the middle and orange at the bottom
Leo Villareal, Untitled (for San José), 2012. LED lights, custom software, and electrical hardware, 32 x 68 x 6 inches. San José Museum of Art. Commissioned and purchased with funds contributed by the Acquisitions Committee, 2012.06.

There is an enchanting stillness to Leo Villareal’s color-field light sculptures. When he was an undergraduate student, the artist spent hours staring into the meditative beauty of a Mark Rothko painting in the Yale University Art Gallery.1 Twenty years later, the influence of Rothko’s color field painting appeared in Villareal’s visual manifestation of code. Uninterested in the “‘arm’s race’ of video games and computer graphics” that tends to seek speed and clarity, the artist considered instead, “How few dots can I get?”2 He applied translucent sheets of acrylic to his LED light-grid substructures to diffuse their pixels and sequenced slower, more subtle light movement to a captivating effect. Like looking at what Villareal calls a “digital campfire,” they take the mind on a primordial journey.

  1. JoAnne Northrup, “Animating Light,” in Northrup, ed., Leo Villareal (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 31. ↩︎

  2. JoAnne Northrup, “Animating Light,” in Northrup, ed., Leo Villareal (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 32. ↩︎