Book Description

'I started playing with light as a medium at about the same time I started playing with sound when a teenager.' In 2016 Paul Stolper Gallery in London presented an installation of seven light music boxes by the artist, musician and composer Brian Eno. This new exhibition of lightbox works explores the themes that inform and inspire Eno's particular vision of light and time manipulation. As the artist puts it, 'I have been trying to slow music down so it becomes more like painting, and to animate paintings so they become more like music.' Brian Eno's 'Light Music' uses lightboxes to seamlessly phase through an infinite combination of seductive self-generated 'colourscapes' using a series of interwoven LED lights, each accompanied by a unique musical composition. By extending temporal boundaries with a work that seemingly has no beginning or end, no finality, Eno 'encourages people to stay in one place for a while.' Alongside the light works are two lenticular works, 'Center Decenter' and 'Tender Divisor', which use a medium by which lenses give his printed image the illusion of both depth and the sense of animation, giving movement to what would otherwise be a static abstract shape, re-enforcing Eno's notion of a work 'which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting: it sits still and you move.' Here, for the first time, numerous variations of the light pieces and lenticulars are reproduced together to create an artwork in itself, published for the first time in volume form. The works are accompanied by two specially commissioned essays by the artist and renowned critic and writer, Michael Bracewell.